Title: Inside the Lines
Author: Earl Derr Biggers
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eBook No.: 1301851h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: Apr 2013
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The grinning customs guard lifted his shoulders to his ears and
spread out his palms. "Mais, mamselle—"

"Don't you 'mais' me, sir! I had two trunks—deux
troncs—when I got aboard that wabbly old boat at Dover
this morning, and I'm not going to budge from this wharf until I
find the other one. Where did you learn your French, anyway? Can't
you understand when I speak your language?"

The girl plumped herself down on top of the unhasped trunk and
folded her arms truculently. With a quizzical smile, the customs
guard looked down into her brown eyes, smoldering dangerously now,
and began all over again his speech of explanation.

"Wagon-lit?" She caught a familiar word. "Mais
oui; that's where I want to go—aboard your
wagon-lit, for Paris. Voilà!"—the girl
carefully gave the word three syllables—"mon ticket pour
Paree!" She opened her patent-leather reticule, rummaged
furiously therein, brought out a handkerchief, a tiny mirror, a
packet of rice papers, and at last a folded and punched ticket.
This she displayed with a triumphant flourish.

"Voilà! II dit 'Miss Jane Gerson'; that's
me—moi-même, I mean. And il dit 'deux troncs';
now you can't go behind that, can you? Where is that other
trunk?"

A whistle shrilled back beyond the swinging doors of the
station. Folk in the customs shed began a hasty gathering together
of parcels and shawl straps, and a general exodus toward the train
sheds commenced. The girl on the trunk looked appealingly about
her; nothing but bustle and confusion; no Samaritan to turn aside
and rescue a fair traveler fallen among customs guards. Her eyes
filled with trouble, and for an instant her reliant mouth broke its
line of determination; the lower lip quivered suspiciously. Even
the guard started to walk away.

"Oh, oh, please don't go!" Jane Gerson was on her feet, and her
hands shot out in an impulsive appeal. "Oh, dear; maybe I forgot to
tip you. Here, attende au secours, if you'll only find that
other trunk before the train—"

"Pardon; but if I may be of any assistance—"

Miss Gerson turned. A tallish, old-young-looking man, in a gray
lounge suit, stood heels together and bent stiffly in a bow.
Nothing of the beau or the boulevardier about his face or manner.
Miss Gerson accepted his intervention as heaven-sent.

"Oh, thank you ever so much! The guard, you see, doesn't
understand good French. I just can't make him understand that one
of my trunks is missing. And the train for Paris—"

Already the stranger was rattling incisive French at the guard.
That official bowed low, and, with hands and lips, gave rapid
explanation. The man in the gray lounge suit turned to the
girl.

"A little misunderstanding, Miss—ah—"

"Gerson—Jane Gerson, of New York," she promptly
supplied.

"A little misunderstanding, Miss Gerson. The customs guard says
your other trunk has already been examined, passed, and placed on
the baggage van. He was trying to tell you that it would be
necessary for you to permit a porter to take this trunk to the
train before time for starting. With your permission—"

The stranger turned and halloed to a porter, who came running.
Miss Gerson had the trunk locked and strapped in no time, and it
was on the shoulders of the porter.

"You have very little time, Miss Gerson. The train will be
making a start directly. If I might—ah—pilot you
through the station to the proper train shed. I am not
presuming?"

"You are very kind," she answered hurriedly.

They set off, the providential Samaritan in the lead. Through
the waiting-room and on to a broad platform, almost deserted, they
went. A guard's whistle shrilled. The stranger tucked a helping
hand under Jane Gerson's arm to steady her in the sharp sprint down
a long aisle between tracks to where the Paris train stood. It
began to move before they had reached its mid-length. A guard threw
open a carriage door, in they hopped, and with a rattle of chains
and banging of buffers the Express du Nord was off on its arrow
flight from Calais to the capital.

The carriage, which was of the second class, was comfortably
filled. Miss Gerson stumbled over the feet of a puffy Fleming
nearest the door, was launched into the lap of a comfortably
upholstered widow on the opposite seat, ricochetted back to jam an
elbow into a French gentleman's spread newspaper, and finally was
catapulted into a vacant space next to the window on the carriage's
far side. She giggled, tucked the skirts of her pearl-gray duster
about heir, righted the chic sailor hat on her chestnut-brown head,
and patted a stray wisp of hair back into place. Her meteor flight
into and through the carriage disturbed her not a whit.

As for the Samaritan, he stood uncertainly in the narrow cross
aisle, swaying to the swing of the carriage and reconnoitering
seating possibilities. There was a place, a very narrow one, next
to the fat Fleming; also there was a vacant place next to Jane
Gerson. The Samaritan caught the girl's glance in his indecision,
read in it something frankly comradely, and chose the seat beside
her.

"Very good of you, I'm sure," he murmured. "I did not wish to
presume—"

"You're not," the girl assured, and there was something so
fresh, so ingenuous, in the tone and the level glance of her brown
eyes that the Samaritan felt all at once distinctly satisfied with
the cast of fortune that had thrown him in the way of a distressed
traveler. He sat down with a lifting of the checkered Alpine hat he
wore and a stiff little bow from the waist.

"You are, of course, off duty?" she suggested, with the faintest
possible tinge of regret at the absence of the stripes and buttons
that spell "soldier" with the woman.

"You might say so, Miss Gerson. Egypt—the Nile country is
my station. I am on my way back there after a bit of a vacation at
home—London I mean, of course."

She stole a quick side glance at the face of her companion. A
soldier's face it was, lean and school-hardened and competent.
Lines about the eyes and mouth—the stamp of the sun and the
imprint of the habit to command—had taken from Captain
Woodhouse's features something of freshness and youth, though
giving in return the index of inflexible will and lust for
achievement. His smooth lips were a bit thin, Jane Gerson thought,
and the outshooting chin, almost squared at the angles, marked
Captain Woodhouse as anything but a trifler or a flirt. She was
satisfied that nothing of presumption or forwardness on the part of
this hard-molded chap from Egypt would give her cause to regret her
unconventional offer of friendship.

Captain Woodhouse, in his turn, had made a satisfying, though
covert, appraisal of his traveling companion by means of a narrow
mirror inset above the baggage rack over the opposite seat. Trim
and petite of figure, which was just a shade under the average for
height and plumpness; a small head set sturdily on a round smooth
neck; face the very embodiment of independence and self-confidence,
with its brown eyes wide apart, its high brow under the parting
waves of golden chestnut, broad humorous mouth, and tiny nose
slightly nibbed upward: Miss Up-to-the-Minute New York, indeed!
From the cocked red feather in her hat to the dainty spatted boots
Jane Gerson appeared in Woodhouse's eyes a perfect, virile, vividly
alive American girl. He'd met her kind before; had seen them
browbeating bazaar merchants in Cairo and riding desert donkeys
like strong young queens. The type appealed to him.

The first stiffness of informal meeting wore away speedily. The
girl tactfully directed the channel of conversation into lines
familiar to Woodhouse. What was Egypt like; who owned the Pyramids,
and why didn't the owners plant a park around them and charge
admittance? Didn't he think Rameses and all those other old
Pharaohs had the right idea in advertising—putting up stone
billboards to last all time? The questions came crisp and
startling; Woodhouse found himself chuckling at the shrewd
incisiveness of them. Rameses an advertiser and the Pyramids stone
hoardings to carry all those old boys' fame through the ages! He'd
never looked on them in that light before.

"Just cable that at my expense to old Pop Hildebrand, of
Hildebrand's department store, New York," she flashed back at him.
"I'm trying to convince him of just that very thing."

"Really, now; a department shop! What, may I ask, do you have to
do for—ah—Pop Hildebrand?"

"Oh, I'm his foreign buyer," Jane answered, with a conscious
note of pride. "I'm over here to buy gowns for the winter season,
you see. Paul Poiret—Worth—Paquin; you've heard of
those wonderful people, of course?"

"Can't say I have," the captain confessed, with a rueful smile
into the girl's brown eyes.

"Then you've never bought a Worth?" she challenged. "For if you
had you'd not forget the name—or the price—very
soon."

"Gowns—and things are not in my line, Miss Gerson," he
answered simply, and the girl caught herself feeling a secret
elation. A man who didn't know gowns couldn't be very intimately
acquainted with women. And—well—

"And this Hildebrand, he sends you over here alone just to buy
pretties for New York's wonderful women?" the captain was saying.
"Aren't you just a bit—ah—nervous to be over in this
part of the world—alone?"

"Not in the least," the girl caught him up. "Not about the alone
part, I should say. Maybe I am fidgety and sort of worried about
making good on the job. This is my first trip—my very first
as a buyer for Hildebrand. And, of course, if I should fall
down—"

"Fall down?" Woodhouse echoed, mystified. The girl laughed, and
struck her left wrist a smart blow with her gloved right hand.

"There I go again—slang; 'Vulgar American slang,' you'll
call it. If I could only rattle off the French as easily as I do
New Yorkese I'd be a wonder. I mean I'm afraid I won't make
good."

"Oh!"

"But why should I worry about coming over alone?" Jane urged.
"Lots of American girls come over here alone with an American flag
pinned to their shirt-waists and wearing a Baedeker for a wrist
watch. Nothing ever happens to them."

Captain Woodhouse looked out on the flying panorama of
straw-thatched houses and fields heavy with green grain. He seemed
to be balancing words. He glanced at the passenger across the
aisle, a wizened little man, asleep. In a lowered voice he
began:

"A woman alone—over here on the Continent at this time;
why, I very much fear she will have great difficulties when
the—ah—trouble comes."

"Trouble?" Jane's eyes were questioning.

"I do not wish to be an alarmist. Miss Gerson," Captain
Woodhouse continued, hesitant. "Goodness knows we've had enough
calamity shouters among the Unionists at home. But have you
considered what you would do—how you would get back to
America in case of—war?" The last word was almost a
whisper.

"War?" she echoed. "Why, you don't mean all this talk in the
papers is—"

"Is serious, yes," Woodhouse answered quietly. "Very
serious."

"Why, Captain Woodhouse, I thought you had war talk every summer
over here just as our papers are filled each spring with gossip
about how Tesreau is going to jump to the Feds, or the Yanks are
going to be sold. It's your regular midsummer outdoor sport over
here, this stirring up the animals."

Woodhouse smiled, though his gray eyes were filled with
something not mirth.

"I fear the animals are—stirred, as you say, too far this
time," he resumed. "The assassination of the Archduke
Ferd—"

"Yes, I remember I did read something about that in the papers
at home. But archdukes and kings have been killed before, and no
war came of it. In Mexico they murder a president before he has a
chance to send out 'At home' cards."

"Europe is so different from Mexico," her companion continued,
the lines of his face deepening. "I am afraid you over in the
States do not know the dangerous politics here; you are so far
away; you should thank God for that. You are not in a land where
one man—or two or three—may say, 'We will now go to
war,' and then you go, willy-nilly."

The seriousness of the captain's speech and the fear that he
could not keep from his eyes sobered the girl. She looked out on
the sun-drenched plains of Pas de Calais, where toy villages,
hedged fields, and squat farmhouses lay all in order, established,
seeming for all time in the comfortable doze of security. The
plodding manikins in the fields, the slumberous oxen drawing the
harrows amid the beet rows, pigeons circling over the straw hutches
by the tracks' side—all this denied the possibility of war's
corrosion.

"Don't you think everybody is suffering from a bad dream when
they say there's to be fighting?" she queried. "Surely it is
impossible that folks over here would all consent to destroy this."
She waved toward the peaceful countryside.

"A bad dream, yes. But one that will end in a nightmare," he
answered. "Tell me, Miss Gerson, when will you be through with your
work in Paris, and on your way back to America?"

"Not for a month; that's sure. Maybe I'll be longer if I like
the place."

Woodhouse pondered.

"A month. This is the tenth of July. I am afraid I say, Miss
Gerson, please do not set me down for a meddler—this short
acquaintance, and all that; but may I not urge on you that you
finish your work in Paris and get back to England at least in two
weeks?" The captain had turned, and was looking into the girl's
eyes with an earnest intensity that startled her. "I can not tell
you all I know, of course. I may not even know the truth, though I
think I have a bit of it, right enough. But one of your
sort—to be caught alone on this side of the water by the
madness that is brewing! By George, I do not like to think of
it!"

"I thank you, Captain Woodhouse, for your warning," Jane
answered him, and impulsively she put out her hand to his. "But,
you see, I'll have to run the risk. I couldn't go scampering back
to New York like a scared pussy-cat just because somebody starts a
war over here. I'm on trial. This is my first trip as buyer for
Hildebrand, and it's a case of make or break with me. War or no
war, I've got to make good. Anyway"—this with a toss of her
round little chin—"I'm an American citizen, and nobody'll
dare to start anything with me."

"Right you are!" Woodhouse beamed his admiration. "Now we'll
talk about those skyscrapers of yours. Everybody back from the
States has something to say about those famous buildings, and I'm
fairly burning for first-hand information from one who knows
them."

Laughingly she acquiesced, and the grim shadow of war was pushed
away from them, though hardly forgotten by either. At the man's
prompting, Jane gave intimate pictures of life in the New World
metropolis, touching with shrewd insight the fads and shams of New
York's denizens even as she exalted the achievements of their
restless energy.

Woodhouse found secret amusement and delight in her racy nervous
speech, in the dexterity of her idiom and patness of her
characterizations. Here was a new sort of girl for him. Not the
languid creature of studied suppression and feeble enthusiasm he
had known, but a virile, vivid, sparkling woman of a new land,
whose impulses were as unhindered as her speech was heterodox. She
was a woman who worked for her living; that was a new type, too.
Unafraid, she threw herself into the competition of a man's world;
insensibly she prided herself on her ability to "make
good"—expressive Americanism, that,—under any handicap.
She was a woman with a "job"; Captain Woodhouse had never before
met one such.

Again, here was a woman who tried none of the stale arts and
tricks of coquetry; no eyebrow strategy or maidenly simpering about
Jane Gerson. Once sure Woodhouse was what she took him to be, a
gentleman, the girl had established a frank basis of comradeship
that took no reckoning of the age-old conventions of sex allure and
sex defense. The unconventionality of their meeting weighed nothing
with her. Equally there was not a hint of sophistication on the
girl's part.

So the afternoon sped, and when the sun dropped over the maze of
spires and chimney pots that was Paris, each felt regret at
parting.

"To Egypt, yes," Woodhouse ruefully admitted. "A dreary deadly
'place in the sun' for me. To have met you, Miss Gerson; it has
been delightful, quite."

"I hope," the girl said, as Woodhouse handed her into a taxi, "I
hope that if that war comes it will find you still in Egypt, away
from the firing-line."

"Not a fair thing to wish for a man in the service," Woodhouse
answered, laughing. "I may be more happy when I say my best wish
for you is that when the war comes it will find you a long way from
Paris. Good-by, Miss Gerson, and good luck!"

Captain Woodhouse stood, heels together and hat in hand, while
her taxi trundled off, a farewell flash of brown eyes rewarding him
for the military correctness of his courtesy. Then he hurried to
another station to take a train—not for a Mediterranean port
and distant Egypt, but for Berlin.

"IT would be wiser to talk in German," the English
speech in Berlin " she finished, with a lifting of her shapely bare
shoulders, sufficiently eloquent. The waiter speeded his task of
refilling the man's glass and discreetly withdrew.

"Oh, I'll talk in German quick enough," the man assented,
draining his thin half bubble of glass down to the last fizzing
residue in the stem. "Only just show me you've got the right to
hear, and the good fat bank-notes to pay; that's all." He propped
his sharp chin on a hand that shook slightly, and pushed his lean
flushed face nearer hers. An owlish caution fought the wine fancies
in his shifting lynx eyes under reddened lids; also there was
admiration for the milk-white skin and ripe lips of the woman by
his side. For an instant—half the time of a breath—a
flash of loathing made the woman's eyes tigerish; but at once they
changed again to mild bantering.

"So? Friend Billy Capper, of Brussels, has a touch of the spy
fever himself, and distrusts an old pal?" She laughed softly, and
one slim hand toyed with a heavy gold locket on her bosom. "Friend
Billy Capper forgets old times and old faces—forgets even the
matter of the Lord Fisher letters—"

"Chop it, Louisa!" The man called Capper lapsed into brusk
English as he banged the stem of his wineglass on the damask. "No
sense in raking that up again—just because I ask you a fair
question—ask you to identify yourself in your new job."

"We go no further, Billy Capper," she returned, speaking swiftly
in German; "not another word between us unless you obey my rule,
and talk this language. Why did you get that message through to me
to meet you here in the Café Riche to-night if you did not trust
me? Why did you have me carry your offer to—to headquarters
and come here ready to talk business if it was only to hum and haw
about my identifying myself?"

The tenseness of exaggerated concentration on Capper's gaunt
face began slowly to dissolve. First the thin line of shaven lips
flickered and became weak at down-drawn corners; then the frown
faded from about the eyes, and the beginnings of tears gathered
there. Shrewdness and the stamp of cunning sped entirely, and
naught but weakness remained.

"Louisa—Louisa, old pal; don't be hard on poor Billy
Capper," he mumbled. "I'm down, girl—away down again. Since
they kicked me out at Brussels I haven't had a shilling to bless
myself with. Can't go back to England—you know that; the
French won't have me, and here I am, my dinner clothes my only
stock in trade left, and you even having to buy the wine." A tear
of self-pity slipped down the hard drain of his cheek and splashed
on his hand. "But I'll show 'em, Louisa! They can't kick me out of
the Brussels shop like a dog and not pay for it! I know too much, I
do!"

"And what you know about the Brussels shop you want to sell to
the—Wilhelmstrasse?" the woman asked tensely.

"Yes, if the Wilhelmstrasse is willing to pay well for it,"
Capper answered, his lost cunning returning in a bound.

"I am authorized to judge how much your information is worth,"
his companion declared, leveling a cold glance into Capper's eyes.
"You can tell me what you know, and depend on me to pay well,
or—we part at once."

"But, Louisa"—again the whine—"how do I know you're
what you say? You've flown high since you and I worked together in
the Brussels shop. The Wilhelmstrasse—most perfect spy
machine in the world! How I'd like to be in your shoes,
Louisa!"

She detached the heavy gold locket from the chain on her bosom,
with a quick twist of slim fingers had one side of the case open,
then laid the locket before him, pointing to a place on the bevel
of the case. Capper swept up the trinket, looked searchingly for an
instant at the spot the woman had designated, and returned the
locket to her hand.

"Your number in the Wilhelmstrasse," he whispered in awe.
"Genuine, no doubt. Saw the same sort of mark once before in Rome.
All right. Now, listen, Louisa. What I'm going to tell you about
where Brussels stands in this—this business that's brewing
will make the German general staff sit up." The woman inclined her
head toward Capper's. He, looking not at her but out over the rich
plain of brocades, broadcloths and gleaming shoulders, began in a
monotone;

"When the war comes—the day the war starts, French
artillerymen will be behind the guns at Namur. The
English—"

The Hungarian orchestra of forty strings swept into a wild gipsy
chant. Dissonances, fierce and barbaric, swept like angry tides
over the brilliant floor, of the café. Still Capper talked on, and
the woman called Louisa bent her jewel-starred head to listen. Her
face, the face of a fine animal, was set in rapt attention.

"You mark my words," he finished, "when the German army enters
Brussels proof of what I'm telling you will be there. Yes, in a
pigeonhole of the foreign-office safe those joint plans between
England and Belgium for resisting invasion from the eastern
frontier. If the Germans strike as swiftly as I think they will the
foreign-office Johnnies will be so flustered in moving out they'll
forget these papers I'm telling you about. Then your Wilhelmstrasse
will know they've paid for the truth when they paid Billy
Capper."

Capper eagerly reached for his glass, and, finding it empty,
signaled the waiter.

"I'll buy this one, Louisa," he said grandiloquently. "Can't
have a lady buying me wine all night." He gave the order. "You're
going to slip me some bank-notes to-night—right now, aren't
you, Louisa, old pal?" Capper anxiously honed his cheeks with a
hand that trembled. The woman's eyes were narrowed in thought.

"If I give you anything to-night, Billy Capper, you'll get
drunker than you are now, and how do I know you won't run to the
first English secret-service man you meet and blab?"

"Louisa! Louisa! Don't say that!" Great fear and great yearning
sat in Capper's filmed eyes. "You know I'm honest, Louisa! You
wouldn't milk me this way—take all the info I've got and then
throw me over like a dog!" Cold scorn was in her glance.

"Maybe I might manage to get you a position—with the
Wilhelmstrasse." She named the great secret-service office under
her breath. "You can't go back to England, to be sure; but you
might be useful in the Balkans, where you're not known, or even in
Egypt. You have your good points, Capper; you're a sly little
weasel—when you're sober. Perhaps—"

"Yes, yes; get me a job with the Wilhelmstrasse, Louisa!" Capper
was babbling in an agony of eagerness. "You know my work. You can
vouch for me, and you needn't mention that business of the Lord
Fisher letters; you were tarred pretty much with the same brush
there, Louisa. But, come, be a good sport; pay me at least half of
what you think my info's worth, and I'll take the rest out in
salary checks, if you get me that job. I'm broke, Louisa!" His
voice cracked in a sob. "Absolutely stony broke!"

She sat toying with the stem of her wineglass while Capper's
clasped hands on the table opened and shut themselves without his
volition. Finally she made a swift move of one hand to her bodice,
withdrew it with a bundle of notes crinkling between the
fingers.

"Three hundred marks now, Billy Capper," she said. The man
echoed the words lovingly. "Three hundred now, and my promise to
try to get a number for you with—my people. That's fair?"

"Fair as can be, Louisa." He stretched out claw-like fingers to
receive the thin sheaf of notes she counted from her roll. "Here
comes the wine—the wine I'm buying. We'll drink to my success
at landing a job with—your people."

"For me no more to-night," the woman answered. "My cape,
please." She rose.

"But, I say!" Capper protested. "Just one more bottle—the
bottle I'm buying. See, here it is all proper and cooled. Marks the
end of my bad luck, so it does. You won't refuse to drink with me
to my good luck that's coming?"

"Your good luck is likely to stop short with that bottle, Billy
Capper," she said, her lips parting in a smile half scornful. "You
know how wine has played you before. Better stop now while luck's
with you."

"Hanged if I do!" he answered stubbornly. "After these months of
hand to mouth and begging for a nasty pint of ale in a common
pub—leave good wine when it's right under my nose? Not me!"
Still protesting against her refusal to drink with him the wine he
would pay for himself—the man made that a point of injured
honor—Capper grudgingly helped place the cape of web lace
over his companion's white shoulders, and accompanied her to her
taxi.

"If you're here this time to-morrow night—and sober," were
her farewell words, "I may bring you your number in the—you
understand; that and your commission to duty."

He watched the taxi trundle down the brilliant mirror of Unter
den Linden, a sardonic smile twisting his lips. Then he turned back
to the world of light and perfume and wine—the world from
which he had been barred these many months and for which the
starved body of him had cried out in agony. His glass stood
brimming; money crinkled in his pocket; there were eyes for him and
fair white shoulders. Billy Capper, discredited spy, had come to
his own once more.

The orchestra was booming a rag-time, and the chorus on the
stage of the Winter Garden came plunging to the footlights, all in
line, their black legs kicking out from the skirts like thrusting
spindles in some marvelous engine of stagecraft. They screeched the
final line of a Germanized coon song, the cymbals clanged
"Zam-m-m!" and folk about the clustered tables pattered applause.
Captain Woodhouse, at a table by himself, pulled a wafer of a watch
from his waistcoat pocket, glanced at its face and looked back at
the rococo entrance arches, through which the late-comers were
streaming.

"Henry Sherman, do you think Kitty ought to see this sort of
thing? It's positively indecent!"

The high-pitched nasal complaint came from a table a little to
the right of the one where Woodhouse was sitting.

"There, there, mother! Now, don't go taking all the joy outa
life just because you're seeing something that would make the
minister back in Kewanee roll his eyes in horror. This is Germany,
mother!"

Out of the tail of his eye, Woodhouse could see the family group
wherein Mrs. Grundy had sat down to make a fourth. A blocky little
man with a red face and a pinky-bald head, whose clothes looked as
if they had been whipsawed out of the bolt; a comfortably stout
matron wearing a bonnet which even to the untutored masculine eye
betrayed its provincialism; a slim slip of a girl of about nineteen
with a face like a choir boy's—these were the American
tourists whose voices had attracted Woodhouse's attention. He
played an amused eavesdropper, all the more interested because they
were Americans, and since a certain day on the Calais-Paris
express, a week or so gone, he'd had reason to be interested in all
Americans.

"I'm surprised at you, Henry, defending such an exhibition as
this," the matron's high complaint went on, "when you were mighty
shocked at the bare feet of those innocent Greek dancers the
Ladies' Aid brought to give an exhibition on Mrs. Peck's lawn."

"Well, mother, that was different," the genial little chap
answered. "Kewanee's a good little town, and should stay proper.
Berlin, from what I can see, is a pretty bad big town—and
don't care." He pulled a heavy watch from his waistcoat pocket and
consulted it. "Land's sakes, mother; seven o'clock back home, and
the bell's just ringing for Wednesday-night prayer meeting! Maybe
since it's prayer-meeting night we might be passing our time better
than by looking at this—ah—exhibition."

There was a scraping of chairs, then:

"Henry, I tell you he does look like Albert Downs—the
living image!" This from the woman, sotto voce.

"Sh! mother! What would Albert Downs be doing in Berlin?" The
daughter was reproving.

"Well, Kitty, they say curiosity once killed a cat; but I'm
going to have a better look. I'd swear—"

Woodhouse was slightly startled when he saw the woman from
America utilize the clumsy subterfuge of a dropped handkerchief to
step into a position whence she could look at his face squarely.
Also he was annoyed. He did not care to be stared at under any
circumstances, particularly at this time. The alert and curious
lady saw his flush of annoyance, flushed herself, and joined her
husband and daughter.

"Well, if I didn't know Albert Downs had a livery business which
he couldn't well leave," floated back the hoarse whisper, "I'd say
that was him setting right there in that chair."

"Come, mother, bedtime and after—in Berlin," was the old
gentleman's admonition. Woodhouse heard their retreating footsteps,
and laughed in spite of his temporary chagrin at the American
woman's curiosity. He was just reaching for his watch a second time
when a quick step sounded on the gravel behind him. He turned. A
woman of ripe beauty had her hand outstretched in welcome. She was
the one Billy Capper had called Louisa. Captain Woodhouse rose and
grasped her hand warmly.

"Ah! So good of you! I've been expecting—"

"Yes, I'm late. I could not come earlier." Salutation and answer
were in German, fluently spoken on the part of each.

"You will not be followed?" Woodhouse asked, assisting her to
sit. She laughed shortly.

"Hardly, when a bottle of champagne is my rival. The man will be
well entertained—too well."

"I have been thinking," Woodhouse continued gravely, "that a
place hardly as public as this would have been better for our
meeting. Perhaps—"

"You fear the English agents? Pah! They have ears for keyholes
only; they do not expect to use them in a place where there is
light and plenty of people. You know their clumsiness." Woodhouse
nodded. His eyes traveled slowly over the bold beauty of the
woman's face.

"The man Capper will do for the stalking horse—a willing
nag," went on the woman in a half whisper across the table. "You
know the ways of the Wilhelmstrasse. Capper is what we call 'the
target.' The English suspect him. They will catch him; you get his
number and do the work in safety. We have one man to draw their
fire, another to accomplish the deed. We'll let the English bag him
at Malta—a word placed in the right direction will fix
that—and you'll go on to Alexandria to do the real work."

"Good, good!" Woodhouse agreed.

"The Wilhelmstrasse will give him a number, and send him on this
mission on my recommendation; I had that assurance before ever I
met the fellow to-night. They—the big people—know
little Capper's reputation, and, as a matter of fact, I think they
are convinced he's a little less dangerous working for the
Wilhelmstrasse than against it. At Malta the arrest—the
firing squad at dawn—and the English are convinced they've
nipped something big in the bud, whereas they've only put out of
the way a dangerous little weasel who's ready to bite any hand that
feeds him."

Woodhouse's level glance never left the eyes of the woman called
Louisa; it was alert, appraising.

"But if there should be some slip-up at Malta," he interjected.
"If somehow this Capper should get through to Alexandria, wouldn't
that make it somewhat embarrassing for me?"

"Not at all, my dear Woodhouse," she caught him up, with a
little pat on his hand. "His instructions will be only to report to
So-and-so at Alexandria; he will not have the slightest notion what
work he is to do there. You can slip in unsuspected by the English,
and the trick will be turned."

For a minute Woodhouse sat watching the cavortings of a dancer
on the stage. Finally he put a question judiciously:

"The whole scheme, then, is—"

"This," she answered quickly. "Captain Woodhouse—the real
Woodhouse, you know—is to be transferred from his present
post at Wady Haifa, on the Nile, to Gibraltar—transfer is to
be announced in the regular way within a week. As a member of the
signal service he will have access to the signal tower on the Rock
when he takes his new post, and that, as you know, will be very
important."

"Very important!" Woodhouse echoed dryly.

"This Woodhouse arrives in Alexandria to await the steamer from
Suez to Gib. He has no friends there—that much we know. Three
men of the Wilhelmstrasse are waiting there, whose business it is
to see that the real Woodhouse does not take the boat for Gib. They
expect a man from Berlin to come to them, bearing a number from the
Wilhelmstrasse—( the man who is to impersonate Woodhouse and
as such take his place in the garrison on the Rock. There are two
others of the Wilhelmstrasse at Gibraltar already; they, too, are
eagerly awaiting the arrival of 'Woodhouse' from Alexandria.
Capper, with a number, will start from Berlin for Alexandria.
Capper will never arrive in Alexandria. You will."

"With a number—the number expected?" the man asked.

"If you are clever en route—yes," she answered, with a
smile. "Wine, remember, is Billy Capper's best friend—and
worst enemy."

"Then I will hear from you as to the time and route of departure
for Alexandria?"

"To the very hour, yes. And, now, dear friend—"

Interruption came suddenly from the stage. The manager, in
shirt-sleeves and with hair wildly rumpled over his eyes, came
prancing out from the wings. He held up a pudgy hand to check the
orchestra. Hundreds about the tables rose in a gust of excitement,
of questioning wonder.

"Herren!" The stage manager's bellow carried to the farthest
arches of the Winter Garden. "News just published by the general
staff: Russia has mobilized five divisions on the frontier of East
Prussia and Galicia!"

Not a sound save the sharp catching of breath over all the acre
of tables. Then the stage manager nodded to the orchestra leader,
and in a fury the brass mouths began to bray. Men climbed on table
tops, women stood on chairs, and all—all sang in tremendous
chorus:

THE night of July twenty-sixth. The scene is the
table-cluttered sidewalk before the Café Pytheas, where the Cours
St. Louis flings its night tide of idlers into the broader stream
of the Cannebiere, Marseilles' Broadway—the white street of
the great Provencal port. Here at the crossing of these two streets
summer nights are incidents to stick in the traveler's mind long
after he sees the gray walls of the Chateau d'lf fade below the
steamer's rail. The flower girls in their little pulpits pressing
dewy violets and fragrant clusters of rosebuds upon the strollers
with persuasive eloquence; the mystical eyes of hooded Moors who
see everything as they pass, yet seem to see so little; jostling
Greeks, Levantines, burnoosed Jews from Algiers and red-trousered
Senegalese—all the color from the hot lands of the
Mediterranean is there.

But on the night of July twenty-sixth the old spirit of
indolence, of pleasure seeking, flirtation, intriguing, which was
wont to make this heart of arc-light life in Marseilles pulse
languorously, was gone. Instead, an electric tenseness was abroad,
pervading, infectious. About each sidewalk table heads were
clustered close in conference, and eloquent hands aided explosive
argument. Around the news kiosk at the Café Pytheas corner a
constant stream eddied. Men snatched papers from the pile, spread
them before their faces, and blundered into their fellow
pedestrians as they walked, buried in the inky columns. Now and
again half-naked urchins came charging down the Cannebiere, waving
shinplaster extras above their heads—"L'Allemagne s'arme! La
guerre vient!" Up from the Quai marched a dozen sailors from a
torpedo boat, arms linked so that they almost spanned the
Cannebiere. Their red-tasseled caps were pushed back at cocky
angles on their black heads, and as they marched they shouted in
time: "A Berlin! Hou—hou!"

The black shadow of war—the first hallucinations of the
great madness—gripped Marseilles.

For Captain Woodhouse, just in from Berlin that evening, all
this swirling excitement had but an incidental interest. He sat
alone by one of the little iron tables before the Café Pyreas,
sipping his boc, and from time to time his eyes carelessly followed
the eddying of the swarm about the news kiosk. Always his attention
would come back, however, to center on the thin shoulders of a man
sitting fifteen or twenty feet away with a wine cooler by his side.
He could not see the face of the wine drinker; he did not want to.
All he cared to do was to keep those thin shoulders always in
sight. Each time the solicitous waiter renewed the bottle in the
wine cooler Captain Woodhouse nodded grimly, as a doctor might when
he recognized the symptoms of advancing fever in a patient.

So for two days, from Berlin across to Paris, and now on this
third day here in the Mediterranean port, Woodhouse had kept ever
in sight those thin shoulders and that trembling hand beyond the
constantly crooking elbow. Not a pleasant task; he had come to
loathe and abominate the very wrinkles in the back of that shiny
coat. But a very necessary duty it was for Captain Woodhouse to
shadow Mr. Billy Capper until—the right moment should arrive.
They had come down on the same express together from Paris.
Woodhouse had observed Capper when he checked his baggage, a single
shoddy hand-bag, for La Vendee, the French line ship sailing with
the dawn next morning for Alexandria and Port Said via Malta.
Capper had squared his account at the Hotel Alices de Meilhan, for
the most part a bill for absinth frappes, after dinner that night,
and was now enjoying the night life of Marseilles in anticipation,
evidently, of carrying direct to the steamer with him as his
farewell from France all of the bottled laughter of her peasant
girls he could accommodate.

The harsh memories of how he had been forced to drink the bitter
lees of poverty during the lean months rode Billy Capper hard, and
this night he wanted to fill all the starved chambers of his soul
with the robust music of the grape. So he drank with a purpose and
purposefully. That he drank alone was a matter of choice with
Capper; he could have had a pair of dark eyes to glint over a
goblet into his had he wished—indeed, opportunities almost
amounted to embarrassment. But to all advances from the fair, Billy
Capper returned merely an impolite leer. He knew from beforetime
that he was his one best companion when the wine began to warm him.
So he squared himself to his pleasure with an abandoned rakishness
expressed in the set of his thin shoulders and the forward droop of
his head.

Woodhouse, who watched, noted only one peculiarity in Capper's
conduct: The drinker nursed his stick, a plain, crook-handled
malacca, with a tenderness almost maternal. It never left his
hands. Once when Capper dropped it and the waiter made to prop the
stick against a near-by chair, the little spy leaped to his feet
and snatched the cane away with a growl. Thereafter he propped his
chin on the handle, only removing this guard when he had to tip his
head back for another draft of champagne.

Eleven o'clock came. Capper rose from the table and looked
owlishly about him. Woodhouse quickly turned his back to the man,
and was absorbed in the passing strollers. When he looked back
again Capper was slowly and a little unsteadily making his way
around the corner into the Cannebiere. Woodhouse followed,
sauntering. Capper began a dilatory exploration of the various
cafés along the white street; his general course was toward the
city's slums about the Quai. Woodhouse, dawdling about tree boxes
and dodging into shadows by black doorways, found his quarry easy
to trail. And he knew that each of Capper's sojourns in an oasis
put a period to the length of the pursuit. The time for him to act
drew appreciably nearer with every tipping of that restless
elbow.

Midnight found them down in the reek and welter of the dives and
sailors' frolic grounds. Now the trailer found his task more
difficult, inasmuch as not only his quarry but he himself was
marked by the wolves. Dances in smoke-wreathed rooms slackened when
Capper lurched in, found a seat and ordered a drink. Women with
cheeks carmined like poppies wanted to make predatory love to him;
dock rats drew aside and consulted in whispers. When Capper
retreated from an evil dive on the very edge of the Quai,
Woodhouse, waiting by the doors, saw that he was not the only
shadower. Close against the dead walls flanking the narrow pavement
a slinking figure twisted and writhed after the drunkard, now
spread-eagling all over the street.

Woodhouse quickened his pace on the opposite sidewalk. The
street was one lined with warehouses, their closely shuttered
windows the only eyes. Capper dropped his stick, laboriously
halted, and started to go back for it. That instant the shadow
against the walls detached itself and darted for the victim.
Woodhouse leaped to the cobbles and gained Capper's side just as he
dropped like a sack of rags under a blow from the dock rat's
fist.

"Son of a pig! This is my meat; you clear out!" The humped black
beetle of a man straddling the sprawling Capper whipped a knife
from his girdle and faced Woodhouse. Quicker than light the
captain's right arm shot out; a thud as of a maul on an empty wine
butt, and the Apache turned a half somersault, striking the cobbles
with the back of his head. Woodhouse stooped, lifted the limp
Capper from the street stones, and staggered with him to the
lighted avenue of the Cannebiere, a block away. He hailed a
late-cruising fiacre, propped Capper in the seat, and took his
place beside him.

"To La Vendee, Quai de la Fratemite!" Woodhouse ordered.

The driver, wise in the ways of the city, asked no questions,
but clucked to his crow bait. Woodhouse turned to make a quick
examination of the unconscious man by his side. He feared a stab
wound; he found nothing but a nasty cut on the head, made by brass
knuckles. With the wine helping, any sort of a blow would have put
Capper out, he reflected.

Woodhouse turned his back on the bundle of clothes and reached
for the malacca stick. Even in his coma its owner grasped it
tenaciously at mid-length. Without trying to disengage the clasp,
Woodhouse gripped the wood near the crook of the handle with his
left Kand while with his right he applied torsion above. The crook
turned on hidden threads and came off in his hand. An exploring
forefinger in the exposed hollow end of the cane encountered a
rolled wisp of paper. Woodhouse pocketed this, substituted in its
place a thin clean sheet torn from a card-case memorandum, then
screwed the crook on the stick down on the secret receptacle. By
the light of a match he assured himself the paper he had taken from
the cane was what he wanted.

"Larceny from the person—guilty," he murmured, with a wry
smile of distaste. "But assault—unpremeditated."

The conveyance trundled down a long spit of stone and stopped by
the side of a black hull, spotted with round eyes of light. The
driver, scenting a tip, helped Woodhouse lift Capper to the ground
and prop him against a bulkhead. A bos'n, summoned from La Vendee
by the cabby's shrill whistle, heard Woodhouse's explanation with
sympathy.

"Occasionally, yes, m'sieu, the passengers from Marseilles have
these regrets at parting," he gravely commented, accepting the
ticket Woodhouse had rummaged from the unconscious man's wallet and
a crinkled note from Woodhouse's. Up the gangplank, feet first,
went the new agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. The one who called
himself "captain in his majesty's signal service" returned to his
hotel.

At dawn, La Vendee cleared the harbor for Alexandria via Malta,
bearing a very sick Billy Capper to his destiny. Five hours later
the Castle liner, Castle Claire, for the Cape via Alexandria and
Suez direct, sailed out of the Old Port, among her passengers a
Captain Woodhouse.

MANY a long starlit hour alone on the deck of the
Castle Claire Captain Woodnouse found himself tortured by a
persistent vision. Far back over the northern horizon lay Europe,
trembling and breathless before the imminent disaster—a great
field of grain, each stalk bearing for its head the helmeted head
of a man. Out of the east came a glow, which spread from boundary
to boundary, waxed stronger in the wind of hate. Finally the fire,
devastating, insensate, began its sweep through the close-standing
mazes of the grain. Somewhere in this fire-glow and swift leveling
under the scythe of the flame was a girl, alone, appalled.
Woodhouse could see her as plainly as though a cinema was unreeling
swift pictures before him—the girl caught in this vast
acreage of fire, in the standing grain, with destruction drawing
nearer in incredible strides. He saw her wide eyes, her streaming
hair—saw her running through the grain, whose heads were the
helmeted heads of men. Her hands groped blindly and she was
calling—calling, with none to come in aid. Jane Gerson alone
in the face of Europe's burning!

Strive as he would, Woodhouse could not screen this picture from
his eyes. He tried to hope that ere this, discretion had conquered
her resolution to "make good," and that she had fled from Paris,
one of the great army of refugees who had already begun to pour out
of the gates of France when he passed through the war-stunned
capital a few days before. But, no; there was no mistaking the
determination he had read in those brown eyes that day on the
express from Calais. "I couldn't go scampering back to New York
just because somebody starts a war over here." Brave, yes; but hers
was the bravery of ignorance. This little person from the States,
on her first venture into the complex life of the Continent, could
not know what war there would mean; the terror and magnitude of it.
And now where was she? In Paris, caught in its hysteria of
patriotism and darkling fear of what the morrow would bring forth?
Or had she started for England, and become wedged in the jam of
terrified thousands battling for place on the Channel steamers? Was
her fine self-reliance upholding her, or had the crisis sapped her
courage and thrown her back on the common helplessness of women
before disaster?

Captain Woodhouse, the self-sufficient and aloof, whose training
had been all toward suppression of every instinct save that in the
line of duty, was surprised at himself. That a little American
inconnu—a "business person," he would have styled her under
conditions less personal—should have come into his life in
this definite way was, to say the least, highly irregular. The man
tried to swing his reason as a club against his heart—and
failed miserably. No, the fine brave spirit that looked out of
those big brown eyes would not be argued out of court. Jane Gerson
was a girl who was different, and that very difference was
altogether alluring. Woodhouse caught himself going over the
incidents of their meeting. Fondly he reviewed scraps of their
conversation on the train, lingering on the pat slang she used so
unconsciously.

Was it possible Jane Gerson ever had a thought for Captain
Woodhouse? The man winced a little at this speculation. Had it been
fair of him when he so glibly practised a deception on her? If she
knew what his present business was, would she understand; would she
approve? Could this little American ever know, or believe, that
some sorts of service were honorable?

Just before the Castle Claire raised the breakwater of
Alexandria came a wireless, which was posted at the head of the
saloon companionway:

"Germany declares war on Russia. German flying column reported
moving through Luxemburg on Belgium."

The fire was set to the grain.

Upon landing, Captain Woodhouse's first business was to go to a
hotel on the Grand Square, which is the favorite stopping place of
officers coming down from the Nile country. He fought his way
through the predatory hordes of yelling donkey boys and obsequious
dragomans at the door, and entered the palm-shaded court, which
served as office and lounge. Woodhouse paused for a second behind a
screen of palm leaves and cast a quick eye around the court. None
of the loungers there was known to him. He strode to the desk.

"Ah, sir, a room with bath, overlooking the gardens on the north
side—very cool." The Greek clerk behind the desk smiled a
welcome.

"Perhaps," Woodhouse answered shortly, and he turned the
register around to read the names of the recent comers. On the
first page he found nothing to interest him; but among the arrivals
of the day before he saw this entry: "C. G. Woodhouse, Capt. Sig.
Service; Wady Haifa." After it was entered the room number:
"210."

Woodhouse read right over the name and turned another page a bit
impatiently. This he scanned with seeming eagerness, while the
clerk stood with pen poised.

"Um! When is the first boat out for Gibraltar?" Woodhouse
asked.

"Well, sir, the Princess Mary is due to sail at dawn day after
to-morrow," the Greek answered judiciously. "She is reported at
Port Said to-day, but, of course, the war—"

Woodhouse turned away.

"But you wish a room, sir—nice room, with bath,
overlooking—"

"No."

"You expected to find a friend, then?"

"Not here," Woodhouse returned bruskly, and passed out into the
blinding square.

He strode swiftly around the statue of Mehemet Ali and plunged
into the bedlam crowd filling a side street. With sure sense of
direction, he threaded the narrow alleyways and bystreets until he
had come to the higher part of the mongrel city, near the Rosetta
Gate. There he turned into a little French hotel, situated far from
the disordered pulse of the city's heart; a sort of pension, it
was, known only to the occasional discriminating tourist. Maitre
Mouquere was proud of the anonymity his house preserved, and
abhorred poor, driven Cook's slaves as he would a plague. In his
Cap de Liberte one was lost to all the world of Alexandria.

Thither the captain's baggage had been sent direct from the
steamer. After a glass with Maitre Mouquere and a half hour's
discussion of the day's great news, Woodhouse pleaded a touch of
the sun, and went to his room. There he remained, until the gold of
sunset had faded from the Mosque of Omar's great dome and all the
city from Pharos and its harbor hedge of masts to El Meks winked
with lights. Then he took carriage to the railroad station and
entrained for Ramleh. What South Kensington is to London and the
Oranges are to New York, Ramleh is to Alexandria—the suburb
of homes. There pretty villas lie in the lap of the delta's
greenery, skirted by canals, cooled by the winds off Aboukir Bay
and shaded by great palms—the one beauty spot in all the
hybrid product of East and West that is the present city of
Alexander.

Remembering directions he had received in Berlin, Woodhouse
threaded shaded streets until he paused before a stone gateway set
in a high wall. On one of the pillars a small brass plate was
inset. By the light of a near-by arc, Woodhouse read the
inscription on it:

Emil Koch, M. D.,
32 Queen's Terrace.

He threw back his shoulders with a sudden gesture, which might
have been taken for that of a man about to make a plunge, and rang
the bell. The heavy wooden gate, filling all the space of the arch,
was opened by a tall Numidian in house livery of white. He nodded
an affirmative to Woodhouse's question, and led the way through an
avenue of flaming hibiscus to a house, set far back under heavy
shadow of acacias. On every hand were gardens, rank foliage
shutting off this walled yard from the street and neighboring
dwellings. The heavy gate closed behind the visitor with a sharp
snap. One might have said that Doctor Koch lived in pretty secure
isolation.

Woodhouse was shown into a small room off the main hall, by its
furnishings and position evidently a waiting-room for the doctor's
patients. The Numidian bowed, and disappeared. Alone, Woodhouse
rose and strolled aimlessly about the room, flipped the covers of
magazines on the table, picked up and hefted the bronze Buddha on
the onyx mantel, noted, with a careless glance, the position of the
two windows in relation to the entrance door and the folding doors,
now shut, which doubtless gave on the consultation room. As he was
regarding these doors they rolled back and a short thickset man,
with a heavy mane of iron-gray hair and black brush of beard, stood
between-them. He looked at Woodhouse through thick-lensed glasses,
which gave to his stare a curiously intent bent.

"My office hours are from two to four, afternoons," Doctor Koch
said. He spoke in English, but his speech was burred by a slight
heaviness on the aspirants, reminiscent of his mother tongue. The
doctor did not ask Woodhouse to enter the consultation room, but
continued standing between the folding doors, staring fixedly
through his thick lenses.

"I know that, Doctor," Woodhouse began apologetically, following
the physician's lead and turning his tongue to English. "But, you
see, in a case like mine I have to intrude"—it was "haf" and
"indrude" as Woodhouse gave these words—"because I could not
be here during your office hours. You will pardon?"

Doctor Koch's eyes widened just perceptibly at the hint of a
Germanic strain in his visitor's speech—just a hint quickly
glossed over. But still he remained standing in his former attitude
of annoyance.

"Was the sun, then, too hot to bermit you to come to my house
during regular office hours? At nights I see no
batients—bositively none."

"The sun—perhaps," Woodhouse replied guardedly. "But as I
happened just to arrive to-day from Marseilles, and your name was
strongly recommended to me as one to consult in a case such as
mine—"

"Where was my name recommended to you, and by whom?" Doctor Koch
interrupted in sudden interest.

Woodhouse looked at him steadily. "In Berlin—and by a
friend of yours," he answered.

"Indeed?" The doctor stepped back from the doors, and motioned
his visitor into the consultation room.

Woodhouse stepped into a large room lighted by a single
green-shaded reading lamp, which threw a white circle of light
straight down upon a litter of thin-bladed scalpels in a glass dish
of disinfectant on a table. The shadowy outlines of an operating
chair, of high-shouldered bookcases, and the dull glint of
instruments in a long glass case were almost imperceptible because
of the centering of all light upon the glass dish of knives. Doctor
Koch dragged a chair out from the shadows, and, carelessly enough,
placed it in the area of radiance; he motioned Woodhouse to sit.
The physician leaned carelessly against an arm of the operating
chair; his face was in the shadow save where reflected light shone
from his glasses, giving them the aspect of detached eyes.

"So, a friend—a friend in Berlin told you to consult me,
eh? Berlin is a long way from Kamleh—especially in these
times. Greater physicians than I live in Berlin. Why—"

"My friend in Berlin told me you were the only physician who
could help me in my peculiar trouble." Imperceptibly the accenting
of the aspirants in Woodhouse's speech grew more marked; his voice
took on a throaty character. "By some specialists my life even has
been set to end in a certain year, so sure is fate for those
afflicted like myself."

"So? What year is it, then, you die?" Doctor Koch's strangely
detached eyes—those eyes of glass glowing dimly in the
shadow—seemed to flicker palely with a light all their own.
Captain Woodhouse, sitting under the white spray of the shaded
incandescent, looked up carelessly to meet the stare.

"Why, they give me plenty of time to enjoy myself," he answered,
with a light laugh. "They say in 1932—"

"Nineteen thirty-two!" Doctor Koch stepped lightly to the closed
folding doors, trundled them back an inch to assure himself nobody
was in the waiting-room, then closed and locked them. He did
similarly by a hidden door on the opposite side of the room, which
Woodhouse had not seen. After that he pulled a chair close to his
visitor and sat down, his knees almost touching the other's. He
spoke very low, in German:

"If your trouble is so serious that you will die—in 1932,
I must, of course, examine you for—symptoms."

For half a minute the two men looked fixedly at each other.
Woodhouse's right hand went slowly to the big green scarab stuck in
his cravat. He pulled the pin out, turned it over in his fingers,
and by pressure caused the scarab to pop out of the gold-backed
setting holding it. The bit of green stone lay in the palm of his
left hand, its back exposed. In the hollowed back of the beetle was
a small square of paper, folded minutely. This Woodhouse removed,
unfolded and passed to the physician. The latter seized it avidly,
holding it close to his spectacled eyes, and then spreading it
against the light as if to read a secret water mark. A smile
struggled through the jungle of his beard. He found Woodhouse's
hand and grasped it warmly.

"Your symptom tallies with my diagnosis. Nineteen Thirty-two,"
he began rapidly. "Five days ago we heard from—the
Wilhelmstrasse—you would come. We have expected you each day,
now. Already we have got word through to our friends at Gibraltar
of the plan; they are waiting for you."

"Good!" Woodhouse commented. He was busy refolding the thin slip
of paper that had been his talisman, and fitting it into the back
of the scarab. "Woodhouse—he is already at the Hotel Khedive;
saw his name on the register when I landed from the Castle this
morning." Now the captain was talking in familiar German.

"Quite so," Doctor Koch put in. "Woodhouse came down from Wady
Haifa yesterday. Our man up there had advised of the time of his
arrival in Alexandria to the minute. The captain has his ticket for
the Princess Mary, which sails for Gibraltar day after to-morrow at
dawn."

Number Nineteen Thirty-two listened to Doctor Koch's outlining
of the plot with set features; only his eyes showed that he was
acutely alive to every detail. Said he:

"But Woodhouse—this British captain who's being
transferred from the Nile country to the Rock; has he ever served
there before? If he has, why, when I get there—when I am
Captain Woodhouse, of the signal service—I will be
embarrassed if I do not know the ropes."

"Seven years ago Woodhouse was there for a very short time,"
Doctor Koch explained. "New governor since then—changes all
around in the personnel of the staff, I don't doubt. You'll have no
trouble."

Silence between them for a minute, broken by the captain:

"Our friends at Gib—who are they, and how will I know
them?"

The doctor bent a sudden glance of suspicion upon the lean face
before him. His thick lips clapped together stubbornly.

"Aha, my dear friend; you are asking questions. In my time at
Berlin the Wilhelmstrasse taught that all orders and information
came from above—and from there only. Why—"

"I suppose in default of other information I may ask the
governor to point out the Wilhelmstrasse men," Woodhouse answered,
with a shrug. "I was told at Berlin I would learn all that was
necessary to me as I went along, therefore, I supposed—"

"Come—come!" Doctor Koch patted the other's shoulder, with
a heavy joviality. "So you will. When you arrive at Gib, put up at
the Hotel Splendide, and you will not be long learning who your
friends are. I, for instance, did not hesitate overmuch to
recognize you, and I am under the eyes of the English here at every
turn, even though I am a naturalized English citizen—and of
undoubted loyalty." He finished with a booming laugh.

"But Woodhouse; you have arranged a way to have him drop out of
sight before the Princess Mary sails? There will be no
confusion—no slip-up?"

"Do not fear," the physician reassured. "Everything will be
arranged. His baggage will leave the Hotel Khedive for the dock
tomorrow night; but it will not reach the dock. Yours—"

"Will be awaiting the transfer of tags at the Cap de
Liberte—Mouquere's little place," the captain finished. "But
the man himself—you're not thinking of mur—"

"My dear Nineteen Thirty-two," Doctor Koch interrupted, lifting
protesting hands; "we do not use such crude methods; they are
dangerous. The real Captain Woodhouse will not leave
Alexandria—by sea, let us say—for many months. Although
I have no doubt he will not be found in Alexandria the hour the
Princess Mary sails. The papers he carries—the papers of
identity and of transfer from Wady Haifa to Gibraltar—will be
in your hands in plenty of time. You—"

The doctor stopped abruptly. A hidden electric buzzer somewhere
in the shadowed room was clucking an alarm. Koch pressed a button
at the side of the operating chair. There was a sound beyond closed
doors of some one passing through a hallway; the front door opened
and closed.

"Some one at the gate," Doctor Koch explained. "Caesar, my
playful little Numidian—and an artist with the Bedouin dagger
is Caesar—he goes to answer."

Their talk was desultory during the next minutes. The doctor
seemed restless under the suspense of a pending announcement as to
the late visitor. Finally came a soft tapping on the hidden door
behind Woodhouse. The latter heard the doctor exchange whispers
with the Numidian in the hallway. Finally, "Show him into the
waiting-room," Koch ordered. He came back to where the captain was
sitting, a puzzled frown between his eyes.

"An Englishman, Caesar says—an Englishman, who insists on
seeing me—very important." Koch bit the end of one stubby
thumb in hurried thought. He suddenly whipped open the door of one
of the instrument cases, pulled out a stethoscope, and hooked the
two little black receivers into his ears. Then he turned to
Woodhouse.

"Quick! Off with your coat and open your shirt. You are a
patient; I am just examining you when interrupted. This may be one
of these clumsy English secret-service men, and I might need your
alibi." The sound of an opening door beyond the folding doors and
of footsteps in the adjoining room.

"You say you are sleepless at night?" Doctor Koch was talking
English. "And you have a temperature on arising? Hm'm! This under
your tongue, if you please"—he thrust a clinical thermometer
between Woodhouse's lips; the latter already had his coat off, and
was unbuttoning his shirt. Koch gave him a meaning glance, and
disappeared between the folding doors, closing them behind him.

The captain, feeling much like a fool with the tiny glass tube
sprouting from his lips, yet with all his faculties strained to
alertness, awaited developments. If Doctor Koch's hazard should
prove correct and this was an English secret-service man come to
arrest him, wouldn't suspicion also fall on whomever was found a
visitor in the German spy's house? Arrest and search; examination
of his scarab pin—that would not be pleasant.

He tried to hear what was being said beyond the folding doors,
but could catch nothing save the deep rumble of the doctor's
occasional bass and a higher, querulous voice raised in what might
be argument. Had he dared. Woodhouse would have drawn closer to the
crack in the folding doors so that he could hear what was passing;
every instinct of self-preservation in him made his ears yearn to
dissect this murmur into sense. But if Doctor Koch should catch him
eavesdropping, embarrassment fatal to his plans might follow;
besides, he had a feeling that eyes he could not see—perhaps
the unwinking eyes of the Numidian, avid for an excuse to put into
practise his dexterity with the Bedouin dagger—were on
him.

Minutes slipped by. The captain still nursed the clinical
thermometer. The mumble and muttering continued to sound through
the closed doors. Suddenly the high whine of the unseen visitor was
raised in excitement. Came clearly through to Woodhouse's ears his
passionate declaration:

"But I tell you you've got to recognize me. My number's Nineteen
Thirty-two. My ticket was stolen out of the head of my cane
somewhere between Paris and Alexandria. But I got it all
right—got it from the Wilhelmstrasse direct, with orders to
report to Doctor Emil Koch, in Alexandria!"

Capper! Capper, who was to be betrayed to the firing squad in
Malta, after his Wilhelmstrasse ticket had passed from his
possession. Capper on the job!

Woodhouse hurled every foot pound of his will to hear into his
ears. He caught Koch's gruff answer:

"Young man, you're talking madness. You're talking to a loyal
British subject. I know nothing about your Wilhelmstrasse or your
number. If I did not think you were drunk I'd have you held here,
to be turned over to the military as a spy. Now, go before I change
my mind."

Again the querulous protestation of Capper, met by the doctor's
peremptory order. The captain heard the front door close. A long
wait, and Doctor Koch's black beard, with the surmounting eyes of
thick glass, appeared at a parting of the folding doors. Woodhouse,
the tiny thermometer still sticking absurdly from his mouth, met
the basilisk stare of those two ovals of glass with a coldly casual
glance. He removed the thermometer from between his lips and read
it, with a smile, as if that were part of playing a game. Still the
ghastly stare from the glass eyes over the bristling beard,
searching—searching.

"Well," Woodhouse said lightly, "no need of an alibi
evidently."

Doctor Koch stepped into the room with the lightness of a cat,
walked to a desk drawer at one side, and fumbled there a second,
his back to his guest. When he turned he held a short-barreled
automatic at his hip; the muzzle covered the shirt-sleeved man in
the chair.

"Is this—ah, customary?" Woodhouse twiddled the tiny
mercury tube between his fingers and looked unflinchingly at the
small round mouth of the automatic. "Do you make a practise of
consulting a—friend with a revolver at your hip?"

"You heard—what was said in there!" Koch's forehead was
curiously ridged and flushed with much blood.

"Did you ask me to listen? Surely, my dear Doctor, you have
provided doors that are soundproof. If I may suggest, isn't it
about time that you explain this—this melodrama?" The
captain's voice was cold; his lips were drawn to a thin line.
Koch's big head moved from side to side with a gesture curiously
like that of a bull about to charge, but knowing not where his
enemy stands. He blurted out:

"For your information, if you did not overhear: An Englishman
comes just now to address me familiarly as of the Wilhelmstrasse.
He comes to say he was sent to report to me; that his number in the
Wilhelmstrasse is nineteen thirty-two—nineteen thirty-two,
remember; and I am to give him orders. Please explain that before I
pull this trigger."

"The man said his ticket had been stolen from him some time
after he left Paris—stolen from the head of his cane, where
he had it concealed. But the number was nineteen thirty-two." The
doctor voiced this last doggedly.

"You have, of course, had this man followed," the other put in.
"You have not let him leave this house alone."

"Caesar was after him before he left the garden
gate—naturally. But—"

Woodhouse held up an interrupting hand.

"Pardon me. Doctor Koch; did you get this fellow's name?"

"He refused to give it—said I wouldn't know him,
anyway."

"Was he an undersized man, very thin, sparse hair, and a face
showing dissipation?" Woodhouse went on. "Nervous, jerky way of
talking—fingers to his mouth, as if to feel his words as they
come out—brandy or wine breath? Can't you guess who he
was?"

"I guess nothing."

"The target!"

At the word Louisa had used in describing Capper to Woodhouse,
Koch's face underwent a change. He lowered his pistol.

"Ach!" he said. "The man they are to arrest. And you have the
number."

"That was Capper—Capper, formerly of the Belgian
office—kicked out for drunkenness. One time he sold out
Downing Street in the matter of the Lord Fisher letters; you
remember the scandal when they came to light—his majesty, the
kaiser's, Kiel speech referring to them. He is a good stalking
horse."

Koch's suspicion had left him. Still gripping the automatic, he
sat down on the edge of the operating chair, regarding the other
man respectfully.

"Come—come, Doctor Koch; you and I can not continue longer
at cross-purposes." The captain spoke with terse displeasure. "This
man Capper showed you nothing to prove his claims, yet you come
back to this room and threaten my life on the strength of a
drunkard's bare word. What his mission is you know; how he got that
number, which is the number I have shown you on my ticket from the
Wilhelmstrasse—you understand how such things are managed. I
happen to know, however, because it was my business to know, that
Capper left Marseilles for Malta aboard La Vendee four days ago; he
was not expected to go beyond Malta."

Koch caught him up: "But the fellow told me his boat didn't stop
at Malta—was warned by wireless to proceed at all speed to
Alexandria, for fear of the Breslau, known to be in the Adriatic."
Woodhouse spread out his hands with a gesture of finality.

"There you are! Capper finds himself stranded in Alexandria,
knows somehow of your position as a man of the
Wilhelmstrasse—such things can not be hid from the
underground workers; comes here to explain himself to you and
excuse himself for the loss of his number. Is there anything more
to be said except that we must keep a close watch on him?"

The physician rose and paced the room, his hands clasped behind
his back. The automatic bobbed against the tails of his long coat
as he walked. After a minute's restless striding, he broke his step
before the desk, jerked open the drawer, and dropped the weapon in
it. Back to where Woodhouse was sitting he stalked and held out his
right hand stiffly.

"And now," he said, "to keep this fellow Capper in sight until
the Princess Mary sails and I aboard her as Captain Woodhouse, of
Wady Haifa. The man might trip us all up."

"He will not; be sure of that," Koch growled, helping Woodhouse
into his coat and leading the way to the folding doors. "I will
have Caesar attend to him the minute he comes back to report where
Capper is stopping."

"Until when?" the captain asked, pausing at the gate, to which
Koch had escorted him.

"Here to-morrow night at nine," the doctor answered, and the
gate shut behind him. Captain Woodhouse, alone under the shadowing
trees of Queen's Terrace, drew in a long breath, shook his
shoulders and started for the station and the midnight train to
Alexandria.

CONSIDER the mental state of Mr. Billy Capper as
he sank into a seat on the midnight suburban from Ramleh to
Alexandria. Even to the guard, unused to particular observation of
his passengers save as to their possible propensity for trying to
beat their fares, the bundle of clothes surmounted by a rusty brown
bowler which huddled under the sickly light of the second-class
carriage bespoke either a candidate for a plunge off the quay or a
"bloomer" returning from his wassailing. But the eyes of the man
denied this latter hypothesis; sanity was in them, albeit the
merciless sanity that refuses an alternative when fate has its
victim pushed into a corner. So submerged was Capper under the
flood of his own bitter cogitations that he had not noticed the
other two passengers boarding the train at the little tiled
station—a tall, quietly dressed white man and a Numidian with
a cloak thrown over his white livery. The latter had faded like a
shadow into the third-class carriage behind the one in which Capper
rode.

Here was Capper—poor old Hardluck Billy
Capper—floored again, and just when the tide of bad fortune
was on the turn; so ran the minor strain of self-pity under the
brown bowler. A failure once more, and through no fault of his own.
No, no! Hadn't he been ready to deliver the goods? Hadn't he come
all the way down here from Berlin, faithful to his pledge to
Louisa, the girl in the Wilhelmstrasse, ready and willing to embark
on that important mission of which he was to be told by Doctor Emil
Koch? And what happens? Koch turns him into the street like a dog;
threatens to have him before the military as a spy if he doesn't
make himself scarce. Koch refuses even to admit he'd ever heard of
the Wilhelmstrasse. Clever beggar! A jolly keen eye he's got for
his own skin; won't take a chance on being betrayed into the hands
of the English, even when he ought to see that a chap's honest when
he comes and tells a straight story about losing that silly little
bit of paper with his working number on it. What difference if he
can't produce the ticket when he has the number pat on the tip of
his tongue, and is willing to risk his own life to give that number
to a stranger?

Back upon the old perplexity that had kept Capper's brain on
strain ever since the first day aboard La Vendee—who had
lifted his ticket, and when was it done? The man recalled, for the
hundredth time, his awakening aboard the French liner—what a
horror that first morning was, with the ratty little surgeon
feeding a fellow aromatic spirits of ammonia like porridge! Capper,
in this mood of detached review, saw himself painfully stretching
out his arm from his bunk to grasp his stick the very first minute
he was alone in the stateroom; the crooked handle comes off under
his turning, and the white wisp of paper is stuck in the hollow of
the stick. Blank paper!

Safe as safe could be had been that little square of paper
Louisa had given him with his expense money, from the day he left
Berlin until—when? To be sure, he had treated himself to a
little of the grape in Paris and, maybe, in Marseilles; but his
brain had been clear every minute. Oh, Capper would have sworn to
that! The whole business of the disappearance of his Wilhelmstrasse
ticket and the substitution of the blank was simply another low
trick the Capper luck had played on him.

The train rushed through the dark toward the distant prickly
coral bed of lights, and the whirligig of black despair churned
under the brown bowler. No beginning, no end to the misery of it.
Each new attempt to force a little light of hope into the blackness
of his plight fetched up at the same dead wall—here was Billy
Capper, hired by the Wilhelmstrasse, after having been booted out
of the secret offices of England and Belgium—given a show for
his white alley—and he couldn't move a hand to earn his new
salary. Nor could he go back to Berlin, even though he dared return
with confession of the stolen ticket; Berlin was no place for an
Englishman right now, granting he could get there. No, he was in
the backwash again—this time in this beastly half-caste city
of Alexandria, and with—how much was it now?—with a
beggarly fifteen pounds between himself and the beach.

Out of the ruck of Capper's sad reflections the old persistent
call began to make itself heard before ever the train from Ramleh
pulled into the Alexandria station. That elusive country of
fountains, incense and rose dreams which can only be approached
through the neck of a bottle spread itself before him alluringly,
inviting him to forgetfulness. And Capper answered the call.

From the railroad station, he set his course through narrow
villainous streets down to the district on Pharos, where the
deep-water men of all the world gather to make vivid the nights of
Egypt. Behind him was the faithful shadow, Caesar, Doctor Koch's
man. The Numidian trailed like a panther, slinking from cover to
cover, bending his body as the big cat does to the accommodations
of the trail's blinds.

Once Capper found himself in a blind alley, turned and strode
out of it just in time to bump heavily into the unsuspected
pursuer. Instantly a hem of the Numidian's cloak was lifted to
screen his face, but not before the sharp eyes of the Englishman
had seen and recognized it. A tart smile curled the corners of
Capper's mouth as he passed on down the bazaar-lined street to the
Tavern of Thermopylae, at the next corner. So old Koch was taking
precautions, eh? Well, Capper, for one, could hardly blame him; who
wouldn't, under the circumstances?

The Tavern of Thermopylae was built for the Billy Cappers of the
world—a place of genial deviltry where every man's gold was
better than his name, and no man asked more than to see the color
of the stranger's money. Here was gathered as sweet a company of
assassins as one could find from Port Said to Honmoku, all gentle
to fellows of their craft under the freemasonry of hard liquor.
Greeks, Levantines, Liverpool lime-juicers from the Cape,
leech-eyed Finns from a Russian's stokehole, tanned ivory runners
from the forbidden lands of the African back country—all that
made Tyre and Sidon infamous in Old Testament police records was
represented there.

Capper called for an absinth dripper and established himself in
a deserted corner of the smoke-filled room. There was music, of
sorts, and singing; women whose eyes told strange stories, and
whose tongues jumped nimbly over three or four languages, offered
their companionship to those who needed company with their drink.
But Billy Capper ignored the music and closed his ears to the
sirens; he knew who was his best cup companion.

The thin green blood of the wormwood drip-dripped down on to the
ice in Capper's glass, coloring it with a rime like moss. He
watched it, fascinated, and when he sipped the cold sickly-sweet
liquor he was eager as a child to see how the pictures the absinth
drew on the ice had been changed by the draft. Sip—sip; a
soothing numbness came to the tortured nerves. Sip—sip; the
clouds of doubt and self-pity pressing down on his brain began to
shred away. He saw things clearly now; everything was sharp and
clear as the point of an icicle.

He reviewed, with new zest, his recent experiences, from the
night he met Louisa in the Café Riche up to his interview with
Doctor Koch. Louisa—that girl with the face of a fine animal
and a heart as cold as carved amethyst; why had she been so willing
to intercede for Billy Capper with her superiors in the
Wilhelmstrasse and procure him a number and a mission to
Alexandria? For his information regarding the Anglo-Belgian
understanding? But she paid for that; the deal was fairly closed
with three hundred marks. Did Louisa go further and list him in the
Wilhelmstrasse out of the goodness of her heart, or for old
memory's sake? Capper smiled wryly over his absinth. There was no
goodness in Louisa's heart, and the strongest memory she had was
how nearly Billy Capper had dragged her down with him in the
scandal of the Lord Fisher letters.

How the thin green blood of the wormwood cleared the
mind—made it leap to logical reasoning!

Why had Louisa instructed him to leave Marseilles by the steamer
touching at Malta when a swifter boat scheduled to go to Alexandria
direct was leaving the French port a few hours later? Was it that
the girl intended he should get no farther than Malta; that the
English there should--

Capper laughed like the philosopher who has just discovered the
absolute of life's futility. The ticket—his ticket from the
Wilhelmstrasse which Louisa had procured for him; Louisa wanted
that for other purposes, and used him as the dummy to obtain it.
She wanted it before he could arrive at Malta—and she got it
before he left Marseilles. Even Louisa, the wise, had played
without discounting the Double on the wheel—fate's percentage
in every game; she could not know the Vendee would be warned from
lingering at Malta because of the exigency of war, and that Billy
Capper would reach Alexandria, after all.

The green logic in the glass carried Capper along with
mathematical exactness of deduction. As he sipped, his mind became
a thing detached and, looking down from somewhere high above earth,
reviewed the blundering course of Billy Capper's body from Berlin
to Alexandria—the poor deluded body of a dupe. With this
certitude of logic came the beginnings of resolve. Vague at first
and intangible, then, helped by the absinth to focus, was this new
determination. Capper nursed it, elaborated on it, took pleasure in
forecasting its outcome, and viewing himself in the new light of a
humble hero. It was near morning, and the Tavern of Thermopylae was
well-nigh deserted when Capper paid his score and blundered through
the early-morning crowd of mixed races to his hotel. His legs were
quite drunk, but his mind was coldly and acutely sober.

"Very drunk, master," was the report Caesar, the Numidian,
delivered to Doctor Koch at the Ramleh villa. The doctor, believing
Caesar to be a competent judge, chuckled in his beard. Caesar was
called off from the trail.

Across the street from Doctor Koch's home on Queen's Terrace was
the summer home of a major of fusileers, whose station was up the
Nile. But this summer it was not occupied. The major had hurried
his family back to England at the first mutterings of the great
war, and he himself had to stick by his regiment up in the doubtful
Sudan country. Like Doctor Koch's place, the major's yard was
surrounded by a high wall, over which the fronds of big palms and
flowered shrubs draped themselves. The nearest villa, aside from
the Kochs' across the street, was a hundred yards away. At night an
arc light, set about thirty feet from Doctor Koch's gate, marked
all the road thereabouts with sharp blocks of light and shadow. One
lying close atop the wall about the major's yard, screened by the
palms and the heavy branches of some night-blooming ghost flower,
could command a perfect view of Doctor Koch's gateway without being
himself visible.

At least, so Billy Capper found it on the night following his
visit to the German physician's and his subsequent communion with
himself at the Tavern of Thermopylae. Almost with the falling of
the dark, Capper had stepped off the train at Ramleh station,
ferried himself by boat down the canal that passed behind the
major's home, after careful reconnoitering, discovered that the
tangle of wildwood about the house was not guarded by a watchman,
and had so achieved his position of vantage on top of the wall
directly opposite the gateway of No. 32. He was stretched flat.
Through the spaces between the dry fingers of a palm leaf he could
command a good view of the gate and of the road on either side. Few
pedestrians passed below him; an automobile or two puffed by; but
in the main, Queen's Terrace was deserted and Capper was alone. It
was a tedious vigil. Capper had no reliance except his instinct of
a spy familiar with spy's work to assure that he would be rewarded
for his pains. Some sixth sense in him had prompted him to come
thither, sure in the promise that the night would not be misspent.
A clock somewhere off in the odorous dark struck the hour twice,
and Capper fidgeted. The hard stone he was lying on cramped
him.

The sound of footsteps on the flagged walk aroused momentary
interest. He looked out through his screen of green and saw a tall
well-knit figure of a man approach the opposite gate, stop and ring
the bell. Instantly Capper tingled with the hunting fever of his
trade. In the strong light from the arc he could study minutely the
face of the man at the gate—smoothly shaven, slightly gaunt
and with thin lips above a strong chin. It was a striking
face—one easily remembered. The gate opened; beyond it Capper
saw, for an instant, the white figure of the Numidian he had bumped
into at the alley's mouth. The gate closed on both.

Another weary hour for the ferret on the wall, then something
happened that was reward enough for cramped muscles and taut
nerves. An automobile purred up to the gate; out of it hopped two
men, while a third, tilted over like one drunk, remained on the
rear seat of the tonneau. One rang the bell. The two before the
gate fidgeted anxiously for it to be opened. Capper paid not so
much heed to them as to the half-reclining figure in the machine.
It was in strong light, Capper saw, with a leap of his heart, that
the man in the machine was clothed in the khaki service uniform of
the British army—an officer's uniform he judged by the
trimness of its fitting, though he could not see the shoulder
straps. The unconscious man was bareheaded and one side of his face
was darkened by a broad trickle of blood from the scalp.

When the gate opened, there were a few hurried words between the
Numidian and the two who had waited. All three united in lifting an
inert figure from the car and carrying it quickly through the gate.
Consumed with the desire to follow them into the labyrinth of the
doctor's yard, yet not daring, Capper remained plastered to the
wall.

Captain Woodhouse, sitting in the consultation room with the
doctor, heard the front door open and the scuffle of burdened feet
in the hall. Doctor Koch hopped nimbly to the folding doors and
threw them back. First, the Numidian's broad back, then, the bent
shoulders of two other men, both illy dressed, came into view.
Between them they carried the form of a man in officer's khaki.
Woodhouse could not check a fluttering of the muscles in his
cheeks; this was a surprise to him; the doctor had given no hint of
it.

"Good—good!" clucked Koch, indicating that they should lay
their burden on the operating chair. "Any trouble?"

"None in the least, Herr Doktor," the larger of the two white
men answered. "At the corner of the warehouse near the docks, where
it is dark—he was going early to the Princess Mary,
and—"

"Yes, a tap on the head—so?" Koch broke in, casting a
quick glance toward where Captain Woodhouse had risen from his
seat. A shrewd appraising glance it was, which was not lost on
Woodhouse. He stepped forward to join the physician by the side of
the figure on the operating chair.

"Our man, Doctor?" he queried casually.

"Your name sponsor," Koch answered, with a satisfied chuckle;
'the original Captain Woodhouse of his majesty's signal service,
formerly stationed at Wady Haifa."

"Quite so," the other answered in English. Doctor Koch clapped
him on the shoulder.

"Perfect, man! You do the Englishman from the book. It will fool
them all."

Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders in deprecation. Koch cackled
on, as he began to layout sponge and gauze bandages on the
glass-topped table by the operating chair:

"You see, I did not tell you of this because—well, that
fellow Capper's coming last night looked bad; even your explanation
did not altogether convince. So I thought we'd have this little
surprise for you. If you were an Englishman you'd show it in the
face of this—you couldn't help it. Eh?"

"Possibly not," the captain vouchsafed. "But what is your plan.
Doctor? What are you going to do with this Captain Woodhouse to
insure his being out of the way while I am in Gibraltar. I hope no
violence—unless necessary."

"Nothing more violent than a violent headache and some fever,"
Koch answered. He was busy fumbling in the unconscious man's
pockets. From the breast pocket of the uniform jacket he withdrew a
wallet, glanced at its contents, and passed it to the captain.

"Your papers, Captain—the papers of transfer from Wady
Haifa to Gibraltar. Money, too. I suppose we'll have to take that,
also, to make appearances perfect—robbery following assault
on the wharves."

Woodhouse pocketed the military papers in the wallet and laid it
down, the money untouched. The two white aids of Doctor Koch, who
were standing by the folding doors, eyed the leather folder
hungrily. Koch, meanwhile, had stripped off the jacket from the
Englishman and was rolling up the right sleeve of his shirt. That
done, he brought down from the top of the glass instrument case a
wooden rack containing several test tubes, stoppled with cotton.
One glass tube he lifted out of the rack and squinted at its
clouded contents against the light.

"A very handy little thing—very handy." Koch was talking
to himself as much as to Woodhouse. "A sweet little product of the
Niam Niam country down in Belgian Kongo. Natives think no more of
it than they would of a water fly's bite; but the white man
is—"

"A virus of some kind?" the other guessed.

"Of my own isolation," Doctor Koch answered proudly. He scraped
the skin on the victim's arm until the blood came, then dipped an
ivory spatula into the tube of murky gelatine and transferred what
it brought up to the raw place in the flesh.

"The action is very quick, and may be violent," he continued.
"Our friend here won't recover consciousness for three days, and he
will be unable to stand on his feet for two weeks, at
least—dizziness, intermittent fever, clouded memory; he'll be
pretty sick."

"Maybe not too sick, but unable to communicate with others,"
Doctor Koch interrupted, with a booming laugh. "This time to-morrow
night our friend will be well out on the Libyan Desert, with some
ungentle Bedouins for company. He's bound for Fezzan—and it
will be a long way home without money. Who knows? Maybe three
months."

Very deftly Koch bound up the abrasion on the Englishman's arm
with gauze, explaining as he worked that the man's desert guardians
would have instructions to remove the bandages before he recovered
his faculties. There would be nothing to tell the luckless prisoner
more than that he had been kidnaped, robbed and carried away by
tribesmen—a not uncommon occurrence in lower Egypt. Koch
completed his work by directing his aids to strip off the rest of
the unconscious man's uniform and clothe him in a nondescript
civilian garb that Caesar brought into the consultation room from
the mysterious upper regions of the house.

"Exit Captain Woodhouse of the signal service," the smiling
doctor exclaimed when the last button of the misfit jacket had been
flipped into its buttonhole, "and enter Captain Woodhouse of the
Wilhelmstrasse." Turning, he bowed humorously to the lean-faced man
beside him. He nodded his head at Caesar; the latter dived into a
cupboard at the far end of the room and brought out a squat flask
and glasses, which he passed around. When the liquor had been
poured. Doctor Koch lifted his glass and squinted through it with
the air of a gentle satyr.

"Gentlemen, we drink to what will happen soon on the Rock of
Gibraltar!" All downed the toast gravely. Then the master of the
house jerked his head toward the unconscious man on the operating
chair. Caesar and the two white men lifted the limp body and
started with it to the door. Doctor Koch preceding them to open
doors. The muffled chug-chugging of the auto at the gate sounded
almost at once.

The doctor and Number Nineteen Thirty-two remained together in
the consultation room for a few minutes, going over, in final
review, the plans that the latter was to put into execution at the
great English stronghold on the Rock. The captain looked at his
watch, found the hour late, and rose to depart. Doctor Koch
accompanied him to the gate, and stood with him for a minute under
the strong light from the near-by arc.

"You go direct to the Princess Mary?" he asked.

"Direct to the Princess Mary" the other answered. "She is to
sail at five o'clock."

A shadow skipped from the top of the wall about the major's
house across the road. A shadow dogged the footsteps of the tall
well-knit man who strode down the deserted Queen's Terrace toward
the tiled station by the tracks. A little more than an hour later,
the same shadow flitted up the gangplank of the Princess Mary at
her berth. When the big P. & O. liner pulled out at dawn, she
carried among her saloon passengers one registered as "C. G.
Woodhouse, Capt. Sig. Service," and in her second cabin a "William
Capper."

"NO, madam does not know me; but she must see me.
Oh, I know she will see me. Tell her, please, it is a girl from New
York all alone in Paris who needs her help."

The butler looked again at the card the visitor had given him.
Quick suspicion flashed into his tired eyes—the same
suspicion that had all Paris mad.

"Ger-son—Mademoiselle Ger-son. That name, excuse me, if I
say it—that name ees—"

"It sounds German; yes. Haven't I had that told me a thousand
times these last few days?" The girl's shoulders drooped limply,
and she tried to smile, but somehow failed. "But it's my name, and
I'm an American—been an American twenty-two years.
Please—please!"

"Madam the ambassador's wife; she ees overwhelm wiz woark." The
butler gave the door an insinuating push. Jane Gerson's
patent-leather boot stopped it. She made a quick rummage in her
bag, and when she withdrew her hand, a bit of bank paper crinkled
in it. The butler pocketed the note with perfect legerdemain,
smiled a formal thanks and invited Jane into the dark cool hallway
of the embassy. She dropped on a skin-covered couch, utterly spent.
Hours she had passed moving, foot by foot, in an interminable line,
up to a little wicket in a steamship office, only to be told,
"Every boat's sold out." Other grilling hours she had passed
similarly before the express office, to find, at last, that her
little paper booklet of checks was as worthless as a steamship
folder. Food even lacked, because the money she offered was not
acceptable. For a week she had lived in the seething caldron that
was Paris in war time, harried, buffeted, trampled and
stampeded—a chip on the froth of madness. This day, the third
of August, found Jane Gerson summoning the last remnants of her
flagging nerve to the supreme endeavor. Upon her visit to the
embassy depended everything: her safety, the future she was
battling for. But now, with the first barrier passed, she found
herself suddenly faint and weak.

"Madam the ambassador's wife will see you. Come!" The butler's
voice sounded from afar off, though Jane saw the gleaming buckles
at his knees very close. The pounding of her heart almost choked
her as she rose to follow him. Down a long hall and into a richly
furnished drawing-room, now strangely transformed by the presence
of desks, filing cabinets, and busy girl stenographers; the click
of typewriters and rustle of papers gave the air of an office at
top pressure. The butler showed Jane to a couch near the portieres
and withdrew. From the tangle of desks at the opposite end of the
room, a woman with a kindly face crossed, with hand extended. Jane
rose, grasped the hand and squeezed convulsively.

"You are—"

"Yes, my dear, I am the wife of the ambassador. Be seated and
tell me all your troubles. We are pretty busy here, but not too
busy to help—if we can."

Jane looked into the sympathetic eyes of the ambassador's wife,
and what she found there was like a draft of water to her parched
soul. The elder woman, smiling down into the white face, wherein
the large brown eyes burned unnaturally bright, saw a trembling of
the lips instantly conquered by a rallying will, and she patted the
small hand hearteningly.

"Dear lady," Jane began, almost as a little child, "I must get
out of Paris, and I've come to you to help me. Every way is closed
except through you."

"So many hundreds like you, poor girl. All want to get back to
the home country, and we are so helpless to aid every one." The
lady of the embassy thought, as she cast a swift glance over the
slender shoulders and diminutive figure beneath them, that here,
indeed, was a babe in the woods. The blatant, self-assured tourist
demanding assistance from her country's representative as a right
she knew; also the shifty, sloe-eyed demi-vierge who wanted no
questions asked. But such a one as this little person "You see, I
am a buyer for Hildebrand's store in New York." Jane was rushing
breathlessly to the heart of her tragedy. "This is my very first
trip as buyer, and—it will be my last unless I can get
through the lines and back to New York. I have seventy of the very
last gowns from Poiret, from Paquin and Worth—you know what
they will mean in the old town back home—and I
must—just simply must get them through. You understand! With
them, Hildebrand can crow over every other gown shop in New York.
He can be supreme, and I will be—well, I will be made!"

The kindly eyes were still smiling, and the woman's heart, which
is unchanged even in the breast of an ambassador's wife, was
leaping to the magic lure of that simple word—gowns.

"But—but the banks refuse to give me a cent on my letter
of credit. The express office says my checks, which I brought along
for incidentals, can not be cashed. The steamship companies will
not sell a berth in the steerage, even, out of Havre or Antwerp or
Southampton—everything gobbled up. You can't get trunks on an
aeroplane, or I'd try that. I just don't know where to turn, and so
I've come to you. You must know some way out."

Jane unconsciously clasped her hands in supplication, and upon
her face, flushed now with the warmth of her pleading, was the
dawning of hope. It was as if the girl were assured that once the
ambassador's wife heard her story, by some magic she could solve
the difficulties. The older woman read this trust, and was touched
by it.

"Have you thought of catching a boat at Gibraltar?" she asked.
"They are not so crowded; people haven't begun to rush out of Italy
yet."

"But nobody wall honor my letter of credit," Jane mourned. "And,
besides, all the trains south of Paris are given up to the
mobilization. Nobody can ride on them but soldiers." The lady of
the embassy knit her brows for a few minutes while Jane anxiously
scanned her face. Finally she spoke:

"The ambassador knows a gentleman—a large-hearted American
gentleman here in Paris—who has promised his willingness to
help in deserving cases by advancing money on letters of credit.
And with money there is a way—just a possible way—of
getting to Gibraltar. Leave your letter of credit with me, my dear;
go to the police station in the district where you live and get
your pass through the lines, just as a precaution against the
possibility of your being able to leave tonight. Then come back
here and see me at four o'clock. Perhaps—just a
chance—"

Hildebrand's buyer seized the hands of the embassy's lady
ecstatically, tumbled words of thanks crowding to her lips. When
she went out into the street, the sun was shining as it had not
shone for her for a dreary terrible week.

At seven o'clock that night a big Roman-nosed automobile, long
and low and powerful as a torpedo on wheels, pulled up at the door
of the American embassy. Two bulky osier baskets were strapped on
the back of its tonneau; in the rear seat were many rugs. A young
chap with a sharp shrewd face—an American—sat behind
the wheel.

The door of the embassy opened, and Jane Gerson, swathed in
veils, and with a gray duster buttoned tight about her, danced out;
behind her followed the ambassador, the lady of the embassy and a
bevy of girls, the volunteer aids of the overworked
representative's staff. Jane's arms went about the ambassador's
wife in an impulsive hug of gratitude and good-by; the ambassador
received a hearty-handshake for his "God speed you!" A waving of
hands and fluttering of handkerchiefs, and the car leaped forward.
Jane Gerson leaned far over the back, and, through cupped hands,
she shouted: "I'll paint Hildebrand's sign on the Rock of
Gibraltar!"

Over bridges and through outlying faubourgs sped the car until
the Barrier was gained. There crossed bayonets denying passage, an
officer with a pocket flash pawing over pass and passport, a curt
dismissal, and once more the motor purred its speed song, and the
lights of the road flashed by. More picket lines, more sprouting of
armed men from the dark, and flashing of lights upon official
signatures. On the heights appeared the hump-shouldered bastions of
the great outer forts, squatting like huge fighting beasts of the
night, ready to spring upon the invader. Bugles sounded; the white
arms of search-lights swung back and forth across the arc of night
in their ceaseless calisthenics; a murmuring and stamping of many
men and beasts was everywhere.

The ultimate picket line gained and passed, the car leaped
forward with the bound of some freed animal, its twin headlights
feeling far ahead the road to the south. Behind lay Paris, the city
of dread. Ahead—far ahead, where the continent is spiked down
with a rock, Gibraltar. Beyond that the safe haven from this
madness of the millions—America.

MR. JOSEPH AIMER, proprietor of the Hotel
Splendide, on Gibraltar's Waterport Street, was alone in his
office, busy over his books. The day was August fifth. The night
before the cable had flashed word to General Sir George Crandall,
Governor-general of the Rock, that England had hurled herself into
the great war. But that was no concern of Mr. Joseph Aimer except
as it affected the hotel business; admittedly it did bring
complications there.

A sleek well-fed Swiss he was; one whose neutrality was publicly
as impervious as the rocky barriers of his home land. A bland eye
and a suave professional smile were the ever-present advertisements
of urbanity on Joseph Aimer's chubby countenance. He spoke with an
accent that might have got him into trouble with the English
masters of the Rock had they not known that certain cantons in
Switzerland occupy an unfortunate contiguity with Germany, and
Aimer, therefore, was hardly to be blamed for an accident of birth.
From a window of his office, he looked out on crooked Waterport
Street, where all the world of the Mediterranean shuffled by on
shoes, slippers and bare feet. Just across his desk was the Hotel
Splendide's reception room—a sad retreat, wherein a
superannuated parlor set of worn red plush tried to give the lie to
the reflection cast back at it by the dingy gold-framed mirror over
the battered fireplace. Gaudy steamship posters and lithographs of
the Sphinx and kindred tourists' delights were the walls' only
decorations. Not even the potted palm, which is the hotel man's
cure-all, was there to screen the interior of the office-reception
room from the curious eyes of the street, just beyond swinging
glass doors. Joseph Aimer had taken poetic license with the word
"splendide"; but in Gibraltar that is permissible; necessary, in
fact. Little there lives up to its reputation save the Rock
itself.

It was four in the afternoon. The street outside steamed with
heat, and the odors that make Gibraltar a lasting memory were at
their prime of distillation. The proprietor of the Splendide was
nodding over his books. A light footfall on the boards beyond the
desk roused him. A girl with two cigar boxes under her arm slipped,
like a shadow, up to the desk. She was dressed in the bright colors
of Spain, claret-colored skirt under a broad Romany sash, and with
thin white waist, open at rounded throat. A cheap tortoise-shell
comb held her coils of chestnut hair high on her head. Louisa of
the Wilhelmstrasse; but not the same Louisa—the sophisticated
Louisa of the Café Riche and the Winter Garden. A timid little
cigar maker she was, here in Gibraltar.

"Louisa!" Aimer's head bobbed up on a suddenly stiffened neck as
he whispered her name. She set her boxes of cigars on the desk,
opened them, and as she made gestures to point the worthiness of
her wares, she spoke swiftly, and in a half whisper:

"All is as we hoped. Aimer. He comes on the Princess
Mary—a cablegram from Koch just got through to-day. I
wanted—"

"You mean—" Aimer thrust his head forward in his
eagerness, and his eyes were bright beads.

"Nineteen Thirty-two," Aimer repeated, under his breath. Then
aloud: "On the Princess Mary, you say?"

"Yes; she is already anchored in the straits. The tenders are
coming ashore. He will come here, for such were his directions in
Alexandria." Louisa started to move toward the street door.

"But you," Aimer stopped her; "the English are making a round-up
of suspects on the Rock. They will ask questions—perhaps
arrest—"

"Me? No, I think not. Just because I was away from Gibraltar for
six weeks and have returned so recently is not enough to rouse
suspicion. Haven't I been Josepha, the cigar girl, to every Tommy
in the garrison for nearly a year? No—no, senor; you are
wrong. These are the purest cigars made south of Madrid. Indeed,
senor."

The girl had suddenly changed her tone to one of professional
wheedling, for she saw three entering the door. Aimer lifted his
voice angrily:

"Josepha, your mother is substituting with these cigars. Take
them back and tell her if I catch her doing this again it means the
cells for her."

The cigar girl bowed her head in simulated fright, sped past the
incoming tourists, and lost herself in the shifting crowd on the
street. Aimer permitted himself to mutter angrily as he turned back
to his books.

"You see, mother? See that hotel keeper lose his temper and
tongue-lash that poor girl? Just what I tell you—these
foreigners don't know how to be polite to ladies."

Henry J. Sherman—"yes, sir, of Kewanee,
lllynoy"—mopped his bald pink dome and glared truculently at
the insulting back of Joseph Aimer. Mrs. Sherman, the lady of
direct impulses who had contrived to stare Captain Woodhouse out of
countenance in the Winter Garden not long back, cast herself
despondently on the decrepit lounge and appeared to need little
invitation to be precipitated into a crying spell. Her daughter
Kitty, a winsome little slip, stood behind her, arms about the
mother's neck, and her hands stroking the maternal cheeks.

"There—there, mother; everything'll come out right," Kitty
vaguely assured. Mrs. Sherman, determined to have no eye for the
cloud's silver lining, rocked back and forth on the sofa and gave
voice to her woe:

"Oh, we'll never see Kewanee again. I know it! I know it! With
everybody pushing and shoving us away from the
steamers—everybody refusing to cash our checks, and all this
fighting going on somewhere up among the Belgians—" The lady
from Kewanee pulled out the stopper of her grief, and the tears
came copiously. Mr. Sherman, who had made an elaborate pretense of
studying a steamer guide he found on the table, looked up hurriedly
and blew his nose loudly in sympathy.

"Cheer up, mother. Even if this first trip of ours—this
'Grand Tower,' as the guide-books call it—has been sorta
tough, we had one compensation anyway. We saw the Palace of Peace
at the Hague before the war broke out. Guess they're leasing it for
a skating rink now, though."

"How can you joke when we're in such a fix? He-Henry, you
ne-never do take things seriously!"

"Why not joke, mother? Only thing you can do over here you don't
have to pay for. Cheer up! There's the Süxonia due here from Naples
some time soon. Maybe we can horn a way up her gangplank. Consul
says—"

Mrs. Sherman looked up from her handkerchief with withering
scorn.

"Tell me a way we can get aboard any ship without having the
money to pay our passage. Tell me that, Henry Sherman!"

"Well, we've been broke before, mother," her spouse answered
cheerily, rocking himself on heels and toes. "Remember when we were
first married and had that little house on Liberty Street—the
newest house in Kewanee it was; and we didn't have a hired girl,
then, mother. But we come out all right, didn't we?" He patted his
daughter's shoulder and winked ponderously. "Come on, girls and
boys, we'll go look over those Rock Chambers the English hollowed
out. We can't sit in our room and mope all day."

The gentleman who knew Kewanee was making for the door when
Aimer, the suave, came out from behind his desk and stopped him
with a warning hand.

"I am afraid the gentleman can not see the famous Rock
Chambers," he purred. "This is war time—since yesterday, you
know. Tourists are not allowed in the fortifications."

"Like to see who'd stop me!" Henry J. Sherman drew himself up to
his full five feet seven and frowned at the Swiss. Aimer rubbed his
hands.

"A soldier—with a gun, most probably, sir."

Mrs. Sherman rose and hurried to her husband's side, in
alarm.

"Henry—Henry! Don't you go and get arrested again!
Remember that last time—the Frenchman at that Bordeaux town."
Sherman allowed discretion to soften his valor.

"Well, anyway"—he turned again to the
proprietor—"they'll let us see that famous signal tower up on
top of the Rock. Mother, they say from that tower up there, they
can keep tabs on a ship sixty miles away. Fellow down at the
consulate was telling me just this morning that's the king-pin of
the whole works. Harbor's full of mines and things; electric switch
in the signal tower. Press a switch up there, and everything in the
harbor—Blam!" He shot his hands above his head to denote the
cataclysm. Aimer smiled sardonically and drew the Illinois citizen
to one side.

"I would give you a piece of advice," he said in a low voice.
"It is—"

"Say, proprietor; you don't charge for advice, do you?" Sherman
regarded him quizzically.

"It is this," Aimer went on, unperturbed: "If I were you I would
not talk much about the fortifications of the Rock. Even talk
is—ah—dangerous if too much indulged."

"Huh! I guess you're right," said Sherman thoughtfully. "You
see—we don't know much about diplomacy out where I come from.
Though that ain't stopping any of the Democrats from going abroad
in the Diplomatic Service as fast as Bryan'll take 'em."

Interruption came startlingly. A sergeant and three soldiers
with guns swung through the open doors from Waterport Street. Gun
butts struck the floor with a heavy thud. The sergeant stepped
forward and saluted Aimer with a businesslike sweep of hand to
visor.

The sergeant turned and gave directions to the guard. They
tramped through a swinging door by the side of the desk while the
Shermans, parents and daughter alike, looked on, with round eyes.
In less than a minute, the men in khaki returned, escorting a
quaking man in white jacket. The barber, greatly flustered,
protested in English strongly reminiscent of his fatherland.

"Orders to take you, Fritz," the sergeant explained not
unkindly.

"But I haf done nothing," the barber cried. "For ten years I haf
shaved you. You know I am a harmless old German." The sergeant
shrugged.

"I fancy they think you are working for the Wilhelmstrasse,
Fritz, and they want to have you where they can keep their eyes on
you. Sorry, you know."

The free-born instincts of Henry J. Sherman would not be downed
longer. He had witnessed the little tragedy of the German barber
with growing ire, and now he stepped up to the sergeant
truculently.

"Seems to me you're not giving Fritz here a square deal, if you
want to know what I think," he blustered. "Now, in my
country—" The sergeant turned on him sharply.

"Who are you—and what are you doing in Gib?" he snapped. A
moan from Mrs. Sherman, who threw herself in her daughter's
arms.

"Kitty, your father's gone and got himself arrested again!"

"Who am I?" Sherman echoed with dignity. "My name, young fellow,
is Henry J. Sherman, and I live in Kewanee, Illynoy. I'm an
American citizen, and you can't—"

"Your passports—quick!" The sergeant held out his hand
imperiously.

"Oh, that's all right, young fellow; I've got 'em, all right."
Kewanee's leading light began to fumble in the spacious breast
pocket of his long-tailed coat. As he groped through a packet of
papers and letters, he kept up a running fire of comment and
exposition:

"Had 'em this afternoon, all right. Here; no, that's my letter
of credit. It would buy-Main Street at home, but I can't get a ham
sandwich on it here. This is—no; that's my only son's little
girl, Emmaline, taken the day she was four years old. Fancy little
girl, eh? Now, that's funny I can't—here's that list of
geegaws I was to buy for my partner in the Empire Mills, flour and
buckwheat. Guess he'll have to whistle for 'em. Now don't get
impatient, young fellow. This Land's sakes, mother, that letter you
gave me to mail, in Algy-kiras. Ah, here you are, all proper and
scientific enough as passports go, I guess."

The sergeant whisked the heavily creased document from Sherman's
hand, scanned it hastily, and gave it back, without a word. The
outraged American tucked up his chin and gave the sergeant glare
for glare.

"If you ever come to Kewanee, young fellow," he snorted, "I'll
be happy to show you our new jail."

"Close in! March!" commanded the sergeant. The guard surrounded
the hapless barber and wheeled through the door, their guns hedging
his white jacket about inexorably. Sherman's hands spread his coat
tails wide apart, and he rocked back and forth on heels and toes,
his eyes smoldering.

"Come on, father"—Kitty had slipped her hand through her
dad's arm, and was imparting direct strategy in a low
voice—"we'll take mother down the street to look at the shops
and make her forget our troubles. They've got some wonderful
Moroccan bazaars in town; Baedeker says so."

"Shops, did you say?" Mrs. Sherman perked up at once, forgetting
her grief under the superior lure.

"Yes, mother. Come on, let's go down and look 'em over."
Sherman's good humor was quite restored. He pinched Kitty's arm in
compliment for her guile. "Maybe they'll let us look at their stuff
without charging anything; but we couldn't buy a postage stamp,
remember."

They sailed out into the crowded street and lost themselves amid
the scourings of Africa and south Europe. Aimer was alone in the
office.

The proprietor fidgeted. He walked to the door and looked down
the street in the direction of the quays. He pulled his watch from
his pocket and compared it with the blue face of the Dutch clock on
the wall. His pudgy hands clasped and unclasped themselves behind
his back nervously. An Arab hotel porter and runner at the docks
came swinging through the front door with a small steamer trunk on
his shoulders, and Aimer started forward expectantly. Behind the
porter came a tall well-knit man, dressed in quiet traveling
suit—the Captain Woodhouse who had sailed from Alexandria as
a passenger aboard the Princess Mary,

He paused for an instant as his eyes met those of the
proprietor. Aimer bowed and hastened behind the desk. Woodhouse
stepped up to the register and scanned it casually.

"A room, sir?" Aimer held out a pen invitingly.

"For the night, yes," Woodhouse answered shortly, and he signed
the register. Aimer's eyes followed the strokes of the pen
eagerly.

"Ah, from Egypt, Captain? You were aboard the Princess Mary,
then?"

"From Alexandria, yes. Show me my room, please. Beastly
tired."

The Arab porter darted forward, and Woodhouse was turning to
follow him when he nearly collided with a man just entering the
street door. It was Mr. Billy Capper.

Both recoiled as their eyes met. Just the faintest flicker of
surprise, instantly suppressed, tightened the muscles of the
captain's jaws. He murmured a "Beg pardon" and started to pass.
Capper deliberately set himself in the other's path and, with a wry
smile, held out his hand.

"Captain Woodhouse, I believe." Capper put a tang of sarcasm,
corroding as acid, into the words. He was still smiling. The other
man drew back and eyed him coldly.

"I do not know you. Some mistake," Woodhouse said.

Aimer was moving around from behind the desk with the soft tread
of a cat, his eyes fixed on the hard-bitten face of Capper.

"You are drunk. Stand aside!" Woodhouse spoke quietly; his face
was very white and strained. Aimer launched himself suddenly
between the two and laid his hands roughly on Capper's thin
shoulders.

"Out you go!" he choked in a thick guttural. "I'll have no
loafer insulting guests in my house."

"Oh, you won't, won't you? But supposing I want to take a room
here—pay you good English gold for it. You'll sing a
different tune, then."

"Before I throw you out, kindly leave my place." By a quick
turn. Aimer had Capper facing the door; his grip was iron. The
smaller man tried to walk to the door with dignity. There he paused
and looked back over his shoulder.

"Remember, Captain Woodhouse," he called back. "Remember the
name against the time we'll meet again. Capper—Mr. William
Capper."

Capper disappeared. Aimer came back to begin profuse apologies
to his guest. Woodhouse was coolly lighting a cigarette. Their eyes
met.

DINNER that evening in the faded diningroom of the
Hotel Splendide was in the way of being a doleful affair for the
folk from Kewanee, aside from Captain Woodhouse, the only persons
at table there. Woodhouse, true to the continental tradition of
exclusiveness, had isolated himself against possible approach by
sitting at the table farthest from the Shermans; his back presented
an uncompromising denial of fraternity. As for Mrs. Sherman, the
afternoon's visit to the bazaars had been anything but a solace,
emphasizing, as it did, their grievous poverty in the midst of a
plenty contemptuous of a mere letter of credit. Henry J. was
wallowing in the lowest depths of nostalgia; he tortured himself
with the reflection that this was lodge night in Kewanee and he
would not be sitting in his chair. Miss Kitty contemplated with
melancholy the distress of her parents.

A tall slender youth with tired eyes and affecting the blase
slouch of the boulevards appeared in the door and cast about for a
choice of tables. Him Mr. Sherman impaled with a glance of
disapproval which suddenly changed to wondering recognition. He
dropped his fork and jumped to his feet.

"Bless me, mother, if it isn't Willy Kimball from old Kewanee!"
Sherman waved his napkin at the young man, summoning him in the
name of Kewanee to come and meet the home folks. The tired eyes
lighted perceptibly, and a lukewarm smile played about Mr.
Kimball's effeminate mouth as he stepped up to the table.

"Why, Mrs. Sherman—and Kitty! And you, Mr.
Sherman—charmed!" He accepted the proffered seat by the side
of Kitty, receiving their hearty hails with languid politeness.
With the sureness of English restraint, Mr. Willy Kimball refused
to become excited. He was of the type of exotic Americans who try
to forget grandpa's corn-fed hogs and grandma's hand-churned
butter. His speech was of Rotten Row and his clothes
Piccadilly.

"Terrible business, this!" The youth fluttered his hands feebly.
"All this harrying about and peeping at passports by every silly
officer one meets. I'm afraid I'll have to go over to America until
it's all over—on my way now, in fact."

"Afraid!" Sherman sniffed loudly, and appraised Mr. Kimball's
tailoring with a disapproving eye. "Well, Willy, it would be too
bad if you had to go back to Kewanee after your many years in
Paris, France; now, wouldn't it?"

Kimball turned to the women for sympathy. "Reserved a
compartment to come down from Paris. Beastly treatment. Held up at
every city—other people crowded in my apartment, though I'd
paid to have it alone, of course—soldier chap comes along and
seizes my valet and makes him join the colors and all that
sort—"

"Huh! Your father managed to worry along without a val-lay, and
he was respected in Kewanee." This in disgust from Henry J.

Kitty flashed a reproving glance at her father and deftly turned
the expatriate into a recounting of his adventures. Under her
unaffected lead the youth, who shuddered inwardly at the
appellation of "Willy," thawed considerably, and soon there was an
animated swapping of reminiscences of the Great Terror—hours
on end before the banks and express offices, dodging of police
impositions, scrambling for steamer accommodations—all that
went to compose the refugee Americans' great epic of August,
1914.

Sherman took pride in his superior adventures: "Five times
arrested between Berlin and Gibraltar, and what I said to that
Dutchman on the Swiss frontier was enough to make his hair
curl."

"Tell you what, Willy: you come on back to Kewanee with us, and
mother and you'll lecture before the Thursday Afternoon Ladies'
Literary Club," Sherman boomed, with a hearty blow of the hand
between Willy's shoulder blades. "I'll have Ed Porter announce it
in advance in the Daily Enterprise and we'll have the whole town
there to listen. 'Ezra Kimball's Boy Tells Thrilling Tale of War's
Alarms.' That's the way the head-lines'll read in the Enterprise
next week."

The expatriate shivered and tried to smile.

"We'll let mother do the lecturing," Kitty came to his rescue.
"'How to Live in Europe on a Letter of Discredit.' That will have
all the gossips of Kewanee buzzing, mother."

The meal drew to a close happily in contrast to its beginning.
Mrs. Sherman and her daughter rose to pass out into the reception
room. Sherman and Kimball lingered.

"Ah-h, Willy—"

"Mr. Sherman—"

Both began in unison, each somewhat furtive and shamefaced.

"Have you any money?" The queries were voiced as one. For an
instant confusion; then the older man looked up into the younger's
face—a bit flushed it was—and guffawed.

"Not a postage stamp, Willy! I guess we're both beggars, and if
mother and Kitty didn't have five trunks between them this Swiss
holdup man who says he's proprietor of this way-station hotel
wouldn't trust us for a fried Qg"

"Same here," admitted Kimball. "I'm badly bent."

"They can't keep us down—us Americans!" Sherman cheered,
taking the youth's arm and piloting him out into the reception
room. "We'll find a way out if we have to cable for a warship to
come and get us."

Just as Sherman and Kimball emerged from the dining-room, there
was a diversion out beyond the glass doors on Waterport Street. A
small cart drew up; from its seat jumped a young woman in a duster
and with a heavy automobile veil swathed under her chin. To the
Arab porter who had bounded out to the street she gave directions
for the removal from the cart of her baggage, two heavy suit-cases
and two ponderous osier baskets. These latter she was particularly
tender of, following them into the hotel's reception room and
directing where they should be put before the desk.

The newcomer was Jane Gerson, Hildebrand's buyer, at the end of
her gasoline flight from Paris. Cool, capable, self-reliant as on
the night she saw the bastions of the capital's outer forts fade
under the white spikes of the search-lights, Jane strode up the
desk to face the smiling Aimer.

"Is this a fortress or a hotel?" she challenged.

"A hotel, lady, a hotel," Aimer purred. "A nice room—yes.
Will the lady be with us long?"

"Heaven forbid! The lady is going to be on the first ship
leaving for New York. And if there are no ships, I'll look over the
stock of coal barges you have in your harbor." She seized a pen and
dashed her signature on the register. The Shermans had pricked up
their ears at the newcomer's first words. Now Henry J. pressed
forward, his face glowing welcome.

"An American—a simon-pure citizen of the United
States—I thought so. Welcome to the little old Rock!" He took
both the girl's hands impulsively and pumped them. Mrs. Sherman,
Kitty and Willy Kimball crowded around, and the clatter of voices
was instantaneous: "By auto from Paris; goodness me!" "Not a thing
to eat for three days but rye bread!" "From Strassburg to Luneville
in a farmer's wagon!" Each in a whirlwind of ejaculation tried to
outdo the other's story of hardship and privation.

The front doors opened again, and the sergeant and guard who had
earlier carried off Fritz, the barber, entered. Again gun butts
thumped ominously. Jane looked over her shoulder at the
khaki-coated men, and confided in the Shermans:

"I think that man's been following me ever since I landed from
the ferry."

"I have," answered the sergeant, stepping briskly forward and
saluting. "You are a stranger on the Rock. You come here
from—"

"From Paris, by motor, to the town across the bay; then over
here on the ferry," the girl answered promptly. "What about
it?"

"Your name?"

"Jane Gerson. Yes, yes, it sounds German, I know. But that's not
my fault. I'm an American—a red-hot American, too, for the
last two weeks."

The sergeant's face was wooden.

"Where are you going?"

"To New York, on the Saxonia, just as soon as I can. And
the British army can't stop me."

"I haven't any," Jane retorted, with a shade of defiance. "They
were taken from me in Spain, just over the French border, and were
not returned."

The sergeant raised his eyebrows in surprise not unmixed with
irony. He pointed to the two big osier baskets, demanding to know
what they contained.

"Gowns—the last gowns made in Paris before the crash.
Fashion's last gasp. I am a buyer of gowns for Hildebrand's store
in New York."

Ecstatic gurgles of pleasure from Mrs. Sherman and her daughter
greeted this announcement. They pressed about the baskets and
regarded them lovingly.

The sergeant pushed them away and tried to throw back the
covers.

"Open your baggage—all of it!" he commanded
snappishly.

Jane, explaining over her shoulder to the women, stooped to
fumble with the hasps.

"Seventy of the darlingest gowns—the very last Paul Poiret
and Paquin and Worth made before they closed shop and marched away
with their regiments. You shall see every one of them."

"Hurry, please, my time's limited!" the sergeant barked.

"I should think it would be—you're so charming," Jane
flung back over her shoulder, and she raised the tops of the
baskets. The other women pushed forward with subdued coos.

The sergeant plunged his hand under a mass of colored
fluffiness, groped for a minute, and brought forth a long roll of
heavy paper. With a fierce mien, he began to unroll the bundle.

"And these?"

"Plans," Hildebrand's buyer answered.

"Plans of what?" The sergeant glared.

"Of gowns, silly! Here—you're looking at that one upside
down! This way! Now isn't that a perfect dear of an afternoon gown?
Poiret didn't have time to finish it, poor man! See that lovely
basque effect? Everything's moyen age this season, you know."

Jane, with a shrewd sidelong glance at the flustered sergeant,
rattled on, bringing gown after gown from the baskets and
displaying them to the chorus of smothered screams of delight from
the feminine part of her audience. One she draped coquettishly from
her shoulders and did an exaggerated step before the smoky mirror
over the mantelpiece to note the effect.

"Isn't it too bad this soldier person isn't married, so he could
appreciate these beauties?" She flicked a mischievous eye his way.
"Of course he can't be married, or he'd recognize the plan of a
gown. Clean hands, there, Mister Sergeant, if you're going to touch
any of these dreams! Here, let me! Now look at that musquetaire
sleeve—the effect of the war—military, you know."

The sergeant was thoroughly angry by this time, and he forced
the situation suddenly near tragedy. Under his fingers a delicate
girdle crackled suspiciously.

"Here—your knife! Rip this open; there are papers of some
sort hidden here." He started to pass the gown to one of his
soldiers. Jane choked back a scream.

"No, no! That's crinoline, stupid! No papers—" She
stretched forth her arms appealingly. The sergeant humped his
shoulders and put out his hand to take the opened clasp-knife.

A plump doll-faced woman, who possessed an afterglow of
prettiness and a bustling nervous manner, flounced through the
doors at this juncture and burst suddenly into the midst of the
group caught in the imminence of disaster.

"What's this—what's this?" She caught sight of the filmy
creation draped from the sergeant's arm. "Oh, the beauty!" This in
a whisper of admiration.

"The last one made by Worth," Jane was quick to explain, noting
the sergeant's confusion in the presence of the stranger, "and this
officer is going to rip it open in a search for concealed papers.
He takes me for a spy."

Surprised blue eyes were turned from Jane to the sergeant. The
latter shamefacedly tried to slip the open knife into his blouse,
mumbling an excuse. The blue eyes bored him through.

"I call that very stupid. Sergeant," reproved the angel of
rescue. Then to Jane "Where are you taking all these wonderful
gowns?"

"To New York. I'm buyer for Hildebrand's, and—"

"But, Lady Crandall, this young woman has no
passports—nothing," the sergeant interposed. "My
duty—"

"Bother your duty! Don't you know a Worth gown when you see it?
Now go away! I'll be responsible for this young woman from now on.
Tell your commanding officer Lady Crandall has taken your duty out
of your hands." She finished with a quiet assurance and turned to
gloat once more over the gowns. The sergeant led his command away
with evident relief.

Lady Crandall turned to include all the refugees in a general
introduction of herself.

"I am Lady Crandall, the wife of the governor general of
Gibraltar," she said, with a warming smile. "I just came down to
see what I could do for you poor stranded Americans. In these
times--"

"An American yourself, I'll gamble on it!" Sherman pushed his
way between the littered baskets and seized Lady Crandall's hands.
"Knew it by the cut of your jib—and—your way of doing
things. I'm Henry J. Sherman, from Kewanee, Illynoy—my wife
and daughter Kitty."

"And I'm from Iowa—the red hills of ole Ioway," the
governor's wife chanted, with an orator's flourish of the hands.
"Welcome to the Rock, home folks!"

Hands all around and an impromptu old-home week right then and
there. Lady Crandall's attention could not be long away from the
gowns, however. She turned back to them eagerly. With Jane Gerson
as her aid, she passed them in rapturous review, Mrs. Sherman and
Kitty playing an enthusiastic chorus.

A pursy little man with an air of supreme importance—Henry
Reynolds he was. United States Consul at Gibraltar—catapulted
in from the street while the gown chatter was at its noisiest. He
threw his hands above his head in a mock attitude of submissiveness
before a highwayman.

" 'S all fixed, ladies and gentlemen," he cried, with a
showman's eloquence. "Here's Lady Crandall come to tell you about
it, and she's so busy riding her hobby—gowns and millinery
and such—she has forgotten. I'll bet dollars to
doughnuts."

"Credit to whom credit is due, Mister Consul," she rallied. "I'm
not stealing anybody's official thunder." The consul wagged a
forefinger at her reprovingly. With impatience, the refugees waited
to hear the news.

"Well, it's this way," Reynolds began. "I've got SO tired having
all you people sitting on my door-step I just had to make
arrangements to ship you on the Saxonia in self-defense.
Saxonia is due here from Naples Thursday—day after
to-morrow; sails for New York at dawn Friday morning. Lady
Crandall, here—and a better American never came out of the
Middle West—has agreed to go bond for your passage money; all
your letters of credit and checks will be cashed by treasury agents
before you leave the dock at New York, and you can settle with the
steamship people right there.

"No, no; don't thank me! There's the person responsible for your
getting home." The consul waved toward the governor's lady, who
blushed rosily under the tumultuous blessings showered on her.
Reynolds ducked out the door to save his face. The Shermans made
their good nights, and with Kimball, started toward the stairs.

"Thursday night, before you sail," Lady Crandall called to them,
"you all have an engagement—a regular American dinner with me
at the Government House. Remember!"

"If you have hash—plain hash—and don't call it a
rag-owt, we'll eat you out of house and home," Sherman shouted as
addendum to the others' thanks.

"And you, my dear"—Lady Crandall beamed upon
Jane—"you're coming right home with me to wait for the
Saxonia's sailing. Oh, no, don't be too ready with your
thanks. This is pure selfishness on my part. I want you to help
plan my fall clothes. There, the secrets out But with all those
beautiful gowns, surely Hildebrand will not object if you leave the
pattern of one of them in an out-of-the-way little place like this.
Come on, now, I'll not take no for an answer. We'll pack up all
these beauties and have you off in no time."

Jane's thanks were ignored by the capable packer who smoothed
and straightened the confections of silk and satin in the osier
hampers Lady Crandall summoned the porter to lift the precious
freight to the back of her dogcart, waiting outside. Aimer,
perturbed at the kidnaping of his guest, came from behind the desk
"You will go to your room now?" he queried anxiously.

"Not going to take it," Jane answered.

Lady Crandall beamed upon Jane.

"Have an invitation from Lady Crandall to visit the State House,
or whatever you call it."

"But, pardon me. The room—it was rented, and I fear one
night's lodging is due. Twenty shillings."

Jane elevated her eyebrows, but handed over a bill.

"Ah, no, lady. French paper—it is worthless to me. Only
English gold, if the lady pleases." Aimer's smile was leonine.

"But it's all I've got; just came from France, and—"

"Then, though it gives me the greatest sorrow, I must hold your
luggage until you have the money changed. Excuse—"

Captain Woodhouse, who had dallied long over his dinner for lack
of something else to do, came out of the dining-room just then, saw
a woman in difficulties with the landlord, and instinctively
stepped forward to offer his services.

"Beg pardon, but can I be of any help?"

Jane turned. The captain's heart gave a great leap and then went
cold. Frank pleasure followed the first surprise in the girl's
eyes.

"Why, Captain Woodhouse—how jolly!—To see you again
after—"

She put out her hand with a free gesture of comradeship.

Captain Woodhouse did not see the girl's hand. He was looking
into her eyes coldly, aloofly.

"I beg your pardon, but aren't you mistaken?"

"Mistaken?" The girl was staring at him, mystified.

"I'm afraid I have not had the pleasure of meeting you," he
continued evenly. "But if I can be of service—now—"

She shrugged her shoulders and turned away from him.

"A small matter. I owe this man twenty shillings, and he will
not accept French paper. It's all I have."

Woodhouse took the note from her.

"I'll take it gladly—perfectly good." He took some money
from his pocket and looked at it. Then, to Aimer: "I say, can you
split a crown?"

"Change for you in a minute, sir—the tobacco shop down the
street." Aimer pocketed the gold piece and dodged out of the
door.

Jane turned and found the deep-set gray eyes of Captain
Woodhouse fixed upon her. They craved pardon—toleration of
the incident just passed.

WOODHOUSE hurried to Jane Gerson's side and began
to speak swiftly and earnestly:

"You are from the States?"

A shrug was her answer. The girl's face was averted, and in the
defiant set of her shoulders Woodhouse found little promise of
pardon for the incident of the minute before. He persisted:

"This war means nothing to you—one side or the other?"

"I have equal pity for them both," she answered in a low
voice.

"We are living in dangerous times," he continued earnestly. "I
tell you frankly, were the fact that you and I had met before to
become known here on the Rock the consequences would be
most—inconvenient—for me." Jane turned and looked
searchingly into his face. Something in the tone rather than the
words roused her quick sympathy. Woodhouse kept on:

"I am sorry I had to deny that former meeting just
now—that meeting which has been with me in such vivid memory.
I regret that were you to allude to it again I would have to deny
it still more emphatically."

"I'm sure I shan't mention it again," the girl broke in
shortly.

"Perhaps since it means so little to you—your
silence—perhaps you will do me that favor, Miss Gerson."

"Certainly." Woodhouse could see that anger still tinged her
speech.

"May I go further—and ask you to—promise?" A shadow
of annoyance creased hep brow, but she nodded.

"That is very good of you," he thanked her. "Shall you be long
on the Rock?"

"No longer than I have to. I'm sailing on the first boat for the
States," she answered.

"Then I am in luck—to-night." Woodhouse tried to speak
easily, though Jane Gerson's attitude was distant. "Meeting you
again—that's luck."

"To judge by what you have just said it must be instead a great
misfortune," she retorted, with a slow smile.

"That is not fair. You know what I mean. Don't imagine I've
really forgotten our first meeting under happier conditions than
these. I know I'm not clever—I can't make it sound as I
would—but I've thought a great deal of you. Miss
Gerson—wondering how you were making it in this great war.
Perhaps—"

Aimer returned at this juncture with the change, which he handed
to Woodhouse. He was followed in by Lady Crandall, who assured Jane
her hampers were securely strapped to the dog-cart. Jane attempted
an introduction.

"This gentleman has just done me a service. Lady Crandall. May I
present—"

"Quite a recent comer. Transferred from the Nile country here.
Report to-morrow."—"

"All of the new officers have to report to the governor's wife
as well," Lady Crandall rallied, with a glance at Jane. "You must
come and see me—and Miss Gerson, who will be with me until
her boat sails."

Woodhouse caught his breath. Jane Gerson, who knew him, at the
governor's home! But he mastered himself in a second and bowed his
thanks. Lady Crandall was moving toward the door. Her ward turned
and held out a hand to Woodhouse.

"So good of you to have straightened out my finances," she said,
with a smile in which the man hoped he read full forgiveness for
his denial of a few minutes before. "If you're ever in America I
hope—" He looked up quickly. "I hope somebody will be as nice
to you. Good night."

Woodhouse and Aimer were alone in the mongrel reception room.
The hour was late. Aimer began sliding folding wooden shutters
across the back of the street windows. Woodhouse lingered over the
excuse of a final cigarette, knowing the moment for his
rapprochement with his fellow Wilhelmstrasse spy was at hand. He
was more distraught than he cared to admit even to himself. The
day's developments had been startling. First the stunning encounter
with Capper there on the very Rock that was to be the scene of his
delicate operations—Capper, whom he had thought sunk in the
oblivion of some Alexandrian wine shop, but who had followed him on
the Princess Mary. The fellow had deliberately cast himself into
his notice, Woodhouse reflected; there had been menace and insolent
hint of a power to harm in his sneering objurgation that Woodhouse
should remember his name against a second meeting.
"Capper—never heard the name in Alexandria, eh?" What could
he mean by that if not that somehow the little ferret had learned
of his visit to the home of Doctor Koch? And that meant—why,
Capper in Gibraltar was as dangerous as a coiled cobra!

Then the unexpected meeting with Jane Gerson, the little
American he had mourned as lost in the fury of the war. Ah, that
was a joy not unmixed with regrets! What did she think of him?
First, he had been forced coldly to deny the acquaintance that had
meant much to him in moments of recollection; then, he had
attempted a lame explanation, which explained nothing and must have
left her more mystified than before. In fact, he had frankly thrown
himself on the mercy of a girl on whom he had not the shadow of
claim beyond the poor equity of a chance friendship—an
incident she might consider as merely one of a day's travel as far
as he could know. He had stood before her caught in a deceit, for
on the occasion of that never-to-be-forgotten ride from Calais to
Paris he had represented himself as hurrying back to Egypt, and
here she found him still out of uniform and in a hotel in
Gibraltar.

Beyond all this, Jane Gerson was going to the governor's house
as a guest. She, whom he had forced, ever so cavalierly, into a
promise to keep secret her half knowledge of the double game he was
playing, was going to be on the intimate ground of association with
the one man in Gibraltar who by a crook of his finger could end
suspicion by a firing squad. This breezy little baggage from New
York carried his life balanced on the rosy tip of her tongue. She
could be careless or she could be indifferent; in either case it
would be bandaged eyes and the click of shells going home for
him.

It was Aimer who interrupted Woodhouse's troubled train of
thought.

"Captain Woodhouse will report for signal duty on the Rock
to-morrow, I suppose?" he insinuated, coming down to where
Woodhouse was standing before the fireplace. He made a show of
tidying up the scattered magazines and folders on the table.

"Report for signal duty?" the other echoed coldly. "How did you
know I was to report for signal duty here?"

"In the press a few weeks ago," the hotel keeper hastily
explained. "Your transfer from the Nile country was announced. We
poor people here in Gibraltar, we have so little to think about,
even such small details of news—"

"Ah, yes. Quite so." Woodhouse tapped back a yawn.

"Your journey here from your station on the Nile—it was
without incident?" Aimer eyed his guest closely. The latter
permitted his eyes to rest on Aimer's for a minute before
replying.

"Quite." Woodhouse threw his cigarette in the fireplace and
started for the stairs.

"Ah, most unusual—such a long journey without incident of
any kind in this time of universal war, with all Europe gone mad."
Aimer was twiddling the combination of a small safe set in the wall
by the fireplace, and his chatter seemed only incidental to the
absorbing work he had at hand. "How will the madness end, Captain
Woodhouse? What will be the boundary lines of Europe's nations
in—say, 1932?"

Aimer rose as he said this and turned to look squarely into the
other's face. Woodhouse met his gaze steadily and without betraying
the slightest emotion.

"In 1932—I wonder," he mused, and into his speech
unconsciously appeared that throaty intonation of the Teutonic
tongue.

"Don't go yet, Captain Woodhouse. Before you retire I want you
to sample some of this brandy." He brought out of the safe a short
squat bottle and glasses. "See, I keep it in the safe, so precious
it is. Drink with me, Captain, to the monarch you have come to
Gibraltar to serve—to his majesty, King George the
Fifth!"

Aimer lifted his glass, but Woodhouse appeared wrapped in
thought; his hand did not go up.

"I see you do not drink to that toast, Captain."

"No—I was thinking—of 1932."

"So?" Quick as a flash Aimer caught him up. "Then perhaps I had
better say, drink to the greatest monarch in Europe."

"To the greatest monarch in Europe!" Woodhouse lifted his glass
and drained it.

Aimer leaned suddenly across the table and spoke tensely: "You
have—something maybe—I would like to see. Some little
relic of Alexandria, let us say."

Woodhouse swept a quick glance around, then reached for the pin
in his tie.

"A scarab; that's all."

In the space of a breath Aimer had seen what lay in the back of
the stone beetle. He gripped Woodhouse's hand fervently.

"Yes—yes. Nineteen Thirty-two! They have told me of your
coining. A cablegram from Koch only this afternoon said you would
be on the Princess Mary. The other—the real
Woodhouse—there will be no slips; he will not—"

"He is as good as a dead man for many months," Woodhouse
interrupted. "Not a chance of a mistake." He slipped easily into
German. "Everything depends on us now, Herr Aimer."

"Perhaps the fate of our fatherland," Aimer replied, cleaving to
English. Woodhouse stepped suddenly away from the side of the
table, against which he had been leaning, and his right hand jerked
back to a concealed holster on his hip. His eyes were hot with
suspicion.

"You do not answer in German; why not? Answer me in German or
by—"

"Ach! What need to become excited?" Aimer drew back hastily, and
his tongue speedily switched to German. "German is dangerous here
on the Rock, Captain. Only yesterday they shot a man against a wall
because he spoke German too well. Do you wonder I try to forget our
native tongue?"

Woodhouse was mollified, and he smiled apologetically. Aimer
forgave him out of admiration for his discretion.

"No need to suspect me—Aimer. They will tell you in Berlin
how for twenty years I have served the Wilhelmstrasse. But never
before such an opportunity—such an opportunity. Stupendous!"
Woodhouse nodded enthusiastic affirmation. "But to business,
Nineteen Thirty-two. This Captain Woodhouse some seven years ago
was stationed here on the Rock for just three months."

"So I know."

"You, as Woodhouse, will be expected to have some knowledge of
the signal tower, to which you will have access." Aimer climbed a
chair on the opposite side of the room, threw open the face of the
old Dutch clock there, and removed from its interior a thin roll of
blue drafting paper. He put it in Woodhouse's hands. "Here are a
few plans of the interior of the signal tower—the best I
could get. You will study them to-night; but give me your word to
bum them before you sleep."

"Very good." Woodhouse slipped the roll into the breast pocket
of his coat. Aimer leaned forward in a gust of excitement, and
bringing his mouth close to the other's ear, whispered
hoarsely:

"England's Mediterranean fleet—twenty-two dreadnaughts,
with cruisers and destroyers—nearly a half of Britain's navy,
will be here any day, hurrying back to guard the Channel. They will
anchor in the straits. Our big moment—it will be here then!
Listen! Room D in the signal tower—that is the room. All the
electric switches are there. From Room D every mine in the harbor
can be exploded in ten seconds."

'Yes, but how to get to Room D?" Woodhouse queried.

"Simple. Two doors to Room D, Captain; an outer door like any
other; an inner door of steel, protected by a combination lock like
a vault's door. Two men on the Rock have that combination: Major
Bishop, chief signal officer, he has in it his head; the
governor-general of the Rock, he has it in his safe."

"We can get it out of the safe easier than from Major Bishop's
head," Woodhouse put in, with a smile.

"Right. We have a friend—in the governor's own
house—a man with a number from the Wilhelmstrasse like you
and me. At any moment in the last two months he could have laid a
hand on that combination. But we thought it better to wait until
necessity came. When the fleet arrives you will have that
combination; you will go with it to Room D, and after
that—"

"The deluge," the other finished.

"Yes—yes! Our country master of the sea at last, and by
the work of the Wilhelmstrasse—despised spies who are shot
like dogs when they're caught, but die heroes' deaths." The hotel
proprietor checked himself in the midst of his rhapsody, and came
back to more practical details:

"But this afternoon—that man from Alexandria who called
you by name. That looked bad—very bad. He knows
something?"

Woodhouse, who had been expecting the question, and who
preferred not to share an anxiety he felt himself best fitted to
cope with alone, turned the other's question aside:

"Never met him before in my life to my best recollection. My
name he picked up on the Princess Mary, of course; I won a pool one
day, and he may have heard some one mention it. Simply a drunken
brawler who didn't know what he was doing."

Aimer seemed satisfied, but raised another point:

"But the girl who has just left here; am I to have no
explanation of her?"

"What explanation do you want?" the captain demanded curtly.

"She recognized you. Who is she? What is she?"

"Devilish unfortunate," Woodhouse admitted. "We met a few weeks
ago on a train, while I was on my way to Egypt, you know. Chatted
together—oh, very informally. She is a capable young woman
from the States—a 'buyer' she calls herself. But I don't
think we need fear complications from that score; she's bent only
on getting home."

"The situation is dangerous," urged Aimer, wagging his head.
"She is stopping at the governor's house; any reference she might
make about meeting you on a train on the Continent when you were
supposed to be at Wady Haifa on the Nile—"

"I have her promise she will not mention that meeting to
anybody."

"Ach! A woman's promise!" Aimer's eyes invoked Heaven to witness
a futile thing. "She seemed rather glad to see you again;
I—"

"Really?" Woodhouse's eyes lighted.

The Splendide's proprietor was pacing the floor as fast as his
fat legs would let him. "Something must be done," he muttered again
and again. He halted abruptly before Woodhouse, and launched a
thick forefinger at him like a torpedo.

"You must make love to that girl. Woodhouse, to keep her on our
side," was his ultimatum.

TURNING to consider the never-stale fortunes of
one of fate's bean bags Mr. Billy Capper, ejected from the Hotel
Splendide, took little umbrage at such treatment; it was not an
uncommon experience, and, besides, a quiet triumph that would not
be dampened by trifles filled his soul. Cheerfully he pushed
through the motley crowd on Waterport Street down to the lower
levels of the city by the Line Wall, where the roosts of sailors
and warrens of quondam adventurers off all the seven seas made far
more congenial atmosphere than that of the Splendide's hollow
pretense. He chose a hostelry more commensurate with his slender
purse than Aimer's, though as a matter of fact the question of
paying a hotel bill was furthest from Billy Capper's thoughts; such
formal transactions he avoided whenever feasible. The proprietor of
the San Roc, where Capper took a room, had such an evil eye that
his new guest made a mental note that perhaps he might have to
leave his bag behind when he decamped. Capper abhorred
violence—to his own person.

Alone over a glass of thin wine—the champagne days, alas!
had been too fleeting—Capper took stock of his situation and
conned the developments he hoped to be the instrument for starting.
To begin with, finances were wretchedly bad, and that was a
circumstance so near the ordinary for Capper that he shuddered as
he pulled a gold guinea and a few silver bits from his pocket, and
mechanically counted them over. Of the three hundred marks
Louisa—pretty snake!—had given him in the Café Riche
and the expense money he had received from her the following day to
cover his expedition to Alexandria for the Wilhelmstrasse naught
but this paltry residue! That second-cabin ticket on the Princess
Mary had taken the last big bite from his hoard, and here he was in
this black-and-tan town with a quid and little more between himself
and the old starved-dog life.

But—and Capper narrowed his eyes and sagely wagged his
head—there'd be something fat coming. When he got knee to
knee with the governor-general of the Rock, and told him what he,
Billy Capper, knew about the identity of Captain Woodhouse, newly
transferred to the signal service at Gibraltar, why, if there
wasn't a cool fifty pounds or a matter of that as honorarium from a
generous government Billy Capper had missed his guess; that's
all.

"I say, Governor, of course this is very handsome of you, but I
didn't come to tell what I know for gold. I'm a loyal Englishman,
and I've done what I have for the good of the old flag."

"Quite right, Mr. Capper; quite right. But you will please
accept this little gift as an inadequate recognition of your
loyalty. Your name shall be mentioned in my despatches home."

Capper rehearsed this hypothetical dialogue with relish. He
could even catch the involuntary gasp of astonishment from the
governor when that responsible officer in his majesty's service
heard the words Capper would whisper to him; could see the
commander of the Rock open a drawer in his desk and take therefrom
a thick white sheaf of bank-notes—count them! Then—ah,
then—the first train for Paris and the delights of Paris at
war-time prices.

The little spy anticipated no difficulty in gaining audience
with the governor. Before he had been fifteen minutes off the
Princess Mary he had heard the name of the present incumbent of
Government House. Crandall—Sir George Crandall; the same who
had been in command of the forts at Rangoon back in '99. Oh, yes.
Capper knew him, and he made no doubt that, if properly reminded of
a certain bit of work Billy Capper had done back in the Burmese
city, Sir George would recall him—and with every reason for
gratefulness. Tomorrow—yes, before ever Sir George had had
his morning's peg, Capper would present himself at Government House
and tell about that house on Queen's Terrace at Ramleh; about the
unconscious British officer who was carried there and hurried
thence by night, and the tall well-knit man in conference with
Doctor Koch who was now come to be a part of the garrison of the
Rock under the stolen name of Woodhouse.

Capper had his dinner, then strolled around the town to see the
sights and hear what he could hear. Listening was a passion with
him.

For the color and the exotic savor of Gibraltar on a hot August
night Capper had no eye. The knife edge of a moon slicing the
battlements of the old Moorish Castle up on the heights; the minor
tinkle of a guitar sounding from a vine-curtained balcony; a
Riffian muleteer's singsong review of his fractious beasts degraded
ancestry—not for these incidentals did the practical mind
under the battered Capper bowler have room. Rather the scraps of
information and gossip passed from one bluecoated artilleryman off
duty, to another over a mug of ale, or the confidence of a
sloe-eyed dancer to the guitar player in a tavern; this was meat
for Capper. Carefully he husbanded his gold piece, and judiciously
he spent his silver for drink. He enjoyed himself in the ascetic
spirit of a monk in a fast, believing that the morrow would bring
champagne in place of the thin wine his pitiful silver could
command.

Then, of a sudden, he caught a glimpse of Louisa—Louisa of
the Wilhelmstrasse. Capper's heart slapped, and an involuntary
impulse crooked his fingers into claws.

The girl was just coming out of a café—the only café
aspiring to Parisian smartness Gibraltar boasts. Her head was bare.
Under an arm she had tucked a stack of cigar boxes. Had it not been
that a steady light from an overhead arc cut her features out of
the soft shadow with the fineness of a diamond-pointed tool. Capper
would have sworn his eyes were playing him tricks. But Louisa's
features were unmistakable, whether in the Lucullian surroundings
of a Berlin summer garden or here on a street in Gibraltar. Capper
had instinctively crushed himself against the nearest wall on
seeing the girl; the crowd had come between himself and her, and
she had not seen him.

All the weasel instinct of the man came instantly to the fore
that second of recognition, and the glint in his eyes and baring of
his teeth were flashed from brute instinct—the instinct of
the night-prowling meat hunter. All the vicious hate which the soul
of Billy Capper could distil flooded to his eyes and made them
venomous. Slinking, dodging, covering, he followed the girl with
the cigar boxes. She entered several dance-halls, offered her wares
at the door of a cheap hotel. For more than an hour Capper shadowed
her through the twisting streets of the old Spanish town. Finally
she turned into a narrow lane, climbed flagstone steps, set the
width of the lane, to a house under the scarp of a cliff, and let
herself in at the street door. Capper, following to the door as
quickly as he dared, found it locked.

The little spy was choking with a lust to kill; his whole body
trembled under the pulse of a murderous passion. He had found
Louisa—the girl who had sold him out—and for her
private ends. Capper made no doubt of that. Some day he had hoped
to run her down, and with his fingers about her soft throat to tell
her how dangerous it was to trick Billy Capper. But to have her
flung across his path this way when anger was still at white heat
in him—this was luck! He'd see this Louisa and have a little
powwow with her even if he had to break his way into the house.

Capper felt the doorknob again; the door wouldn't yield. He drew
back a bit and looked up at the front of the house. Just a dingy
black wall with three unlighted windows set in it irregularly. The
roof projected over the gabled attic like the visor of a cap.
Beyond the farther corner of the house were ten feet of garden
space, and then the bold rock of the cliff springing upward. A low
wall bounded the garden; over its top nodded the pale ghosts of
moonflowers and oleanders.

Capper was over the wall in a bound, and crouching amid flower
clusters, listening for possible alarm. None came, and he became
bolder. Skirting a tiny arbor, he skulked to a position in the rear
of the house; there a broad patch of illumination stretched across
the garden, coming from two French windows on the lower floor. They
stood half open; through the thin white stuff hanging behind them
Capper could see vaguely the figure of a girl seated before a
dressing mirror with her hands busy over two heavy ropes of hair.
Nothing to do but step up on the little half balcony outside the
windows, push through into the room, and—have a little powwow
with Louisa.

An unwonted boldness had a grip on the little spy. Never a
person to force a face-to-face issue when the trick could be turned
behind somebody's back, he was, nevertheless, driven irresistibly
by a furious anger that took no heed of consequences.

With the light foot of a cat, Capper straddled the low rail of
the balcony, pushed back one of the partly opened windows, and
stepped into Louisa's room. His eyes registered mechanically the
details—a heavy canopied bed, a massive highboy of some dark
wood, chairs supporting carelessly flung bits of wearing apparel.
But he noted especially that just as he emerged from behind one of
the loose curtains a white arm remained poised over a brown
head.

"Stop where you are, Billy Capper!" The girl's low-spoken order
was as cold and tense as drawn wire. No trace of shock or surprise
was in her voice. She did not turn her head. Capper was brought up
short, as if he felt a noose about his neck.

Slowly the figure seated before the dressing mirror turned to
face him. Tumbling hair framed the girl's face, partly veiling the
yellow-brown eyes, which seemed two spots of metal coming to
incandescence under heat. Her hands, one still holding a comb, lay
supinely in her lap.

"I admit this is a surprise, Capper," Louisa said, letting each
word fall sharply, but without emphasis. "However, it is like you
to be—unconventional. May I ask what you want this
time—besides money, of course?"

Capper wet his lips and smiled wryly. He had jumped so swiftly
to impulse that he had not prepared himself beforehand against the
moment when he should be face to face with the girl from the
Wilhelmstrasse. Moreover, he had expected to be closer to
her—very close indeed—before the time for words should
come.

"I—I saw you to-night and followed you—here," he
began lamely.

"Flattering!" She laughed shortly.

"Oh, you needn't try to come it over me with words!" Capper's
teeth showed in a nasty grin as his rage flared back from the first
suppression of surprise. "I've come here to have a settlement for a
little affair between you and me."

"Blackmail? Why, Billy Capper, how true to form you run!" The
yellow-brown eyes were alight and burning now. "Have you determined
the sum you want or are you in the open market?"

Capper grinned again, and shifted his weight, inadvertently
advancing one foot a little nearer the seated girl as he did
so.

"Pretty quick with the tongue—as always," he sneered. "But
this time it doesn't go, Louisa. You pay differently this
time—pay for selling me out. Understand!" Again one foot
shifted forward a few inches by the accident of some slight body
movement on the man's part. Louisa still sat before her dressing
mirror, hands carelessly crossed on her lap.

"Selling you out?" she repeated evenly. "Oh! So you finally did
discover that you were elected to be the goat? Brilliant Capper!
How long before you made up your mind you had a grievance?"

The girl's cool admission goaded the little man's fury to
frenzy. His mind craved for action—for the leap and the
tightening of fingers around that taunting throat; but somehow his
body, strangely detached from the fiat of volition as if it were
another's body, lagged to the command. Violence had never been its
mission; muscles were slow to accept this new conception of the
mind. But the man's feet followed their crafty intelligence; by
fractions of inches they moved forward stealthily.

"You wouldn't be here now," Louisa coldly went on, "if you
weren't fortune's bright-eyed boy. You were slated to be taken off
the boat at Malta and shot; the boat didn't stop at Malta through
no fault of ours, and so you arrived at Alexandria—and became
a nuisance." One of the girl's hands lifted from her lap and lazily
played along the edge of the rosewood standard which supported the
mirror on the dressing table. It stopped at a curiously carved
rosette in the rococo scroll-work. Capper's suspicious eye noted
the movement. He sparred for time—the time needed by those
stealthy feet to shorten the distance between themselves and the
girl.

"Why," he hissed, "why did you give me a number with the
Wilhelmstrasse and send me to Alexandria if I was to be caught and
shot at Malta? That's what I'm here to find out."

"Excellent Capper!" Her fingers were playing with the
convolutions of the carved rosette. "Intelligent Capper! He comes
to a lady's room at night to find the answer to a simple question.
He shall have it. He evidently does not know the method of the
Wilhemstrasse, which is to choose two men for every task to be
accomplished. One—the 'target' we call him—goes first;
our friends whose secrets we seek are allowed to become suspicious
of him—we even give them a hint to help them in their
suspicion. They seize the 'target,' and in time of war he becomes a
real target for a firing squad, as you should have been, Capper, at
Malta. Then when our friends believe they have nipped our move in
the bud follows the second man—who turns the trick."

Capper was still wrestling with that baffling stubbornness of
the body. Each word the girl uttered was like vitriol on his
writhing soul. His mind willed murder—willed it with all the
strength of hate; but still the springs of his body were
cramped—by what? Not cowardice, for he was beyond reckoning
results. Certainly not compassion or any saving virtue of chivalry.
Why did his eyes constantly stray to that white hand lifted to
allow the fingers to play with the filigree of wood on the mirror
support?

"Then you engineered the stealing of my number—from the
hollow under the handle of my cane—some time between Paris
and Alexandria?" he challenged in a whisper, his face thrust
forward between hunched shoulders.

"No, indeed. It was necessary for you to have—the evidence
of your profession when the English searched you at Malta. But the
loss of your number is not news; Koch, in Alexandria, has reported,
of course."

The girl saw Capper's foot steal forward again. He was not six
feet from her now. His wiry body settled itself ever so slightly
for a spring. Louisa rose from her chair, one hand still resting on
the wooden rosette of the mirror standard. She began to speak in a
voice drained of all emotion:

"You followed me here to-night, Billy Capper, imagining in your
poor little soul that you were going to do something
desperate—something really human and brutal. You came in my
window all primed for murder. But your poor little soul all went to
water the instant we faced each other. You couldn't nerve yourself
to leap upon a woman even. You can't now."

She smiled on him—a woman's flaying smile of pity. Capper
writhed, and his features twisted themselves in a paroxysm of
hate.

"I have my finger on a bell button here, Capper. If I press it
men will come in here and kill you without asking a question. Now
you'd better go."

Capper's eyes jumped to focus on a round white nib under one of
the girl's fingers there on the mirror's standard. The little ivory
button was alive—a sentient thing suddenly allied against
him. That inanimate object rather than Louisa's words sent fingers
of cold fear to grip his heart. A little ivory button waiting there
to trap him! He tried to cover his vanished resolution with
bluster, sputtering out in a tense whisper:

"You're a devil—a devil from hell, Louisa! But I'll get
you. They shoot women in war time! Sir George Crandall—I know
him—I did a little service for him once in Rangoon. He'll
hear of you and your Wilhelmstrasse tricks, and you'll have your
pretty back against a wall with guns at your heart before to-morrow
night. Remember—"before to-morrow night!"

Capper was backing toward the open window behind him. The girl
still stood by the mirror, her hand lightly resting where the ivory
nib was. She laughed.

"Very well, Billy Capper. It will be a firing party for
two—you and me together. I'll make a frank
confession—tell all the information Billy Capper sold to me
for three hundred marks one night in the Café Riche—the story
of the Anglo-Belgian defense arrangements. The same Billy Capper,
I'll say, who sold the Lord Fisher letters to the kaiser—a
cable to Downing Street will confirm that identification inside of
two hours. And then—"

"And your Captain Woodhouse—your cute little
Wilhelmstrasse captain," Capper flung back from the window,
pretending not to heed the girl's potent threat; "I know all about
him, and the governor'll know, too—same time he hears about
you!"

"Good night, Billy Capper," Louisa answered, with a piquant
smile. "And au revoir until we meet with our backs against that
wall."

Capper's head dropped from view over the balcony edge; there was
a sound of running feet amid the close-ranked plants in the garden,
then silence.

The girl from the Wilhelmstrasse, alone in the house save for
the bent old housekeeper asleep in her attic, turned and laid her
head—a bit weakly—against the carved standard, where in
a florid rosette showed the ivory tip of the hinge for the cheval
glass.

GOVERNMENT HOUSE, one of the Baedeker points of
Gibraltar, stands amid its gardens on a shelf of the Rock about
midway between the Alameda and the signal tower, perched on the
very spine of the lion's back above it. Its windows look out on the
blue bay and over to the red roofs of Algeciras across the water on
Spanish territory. Tourists gather to peek from a respectful
distance at the mossy front and quaint ecclesiastic gables of
Government House, which has a distinction quite apart from its use
as the home of the governor-general. Once, back in the dim ages of
Spain's glory, it was a monastery, one of the oldest in the
southern tip of the peninsula. When the English came their
practical sense took no heed of the protesting ghosts of the monks,
but converted the monastery into a home for the military head of
the fortress—a little dreary, a shade more melancholy than
the accustomed manor hall at home, but adequate and livable.

Thither, on the morning after his arrival, Captain Woodhouse
went to report for duty to Major-general Sir George Crandall,
Governor of the Rock. Captain Woodhouse was in uniform—neat
service khaki and pith helmet, which became him mightily. He
appeared to have been molded into the short-skirted, olive-gray
jacket; it set on his shoulders with snug ease. Perhaps, if
anything, the uniform gave to his features a shade more than their
wonted sternness, to his body just the least addition of an
indefinable alertness, of nervous acuteness. It was nine o'clock,
and Captain Woodhouse knew it was necessary for him to pay his duty
call on Sir George before the eleven o'clock assembly.

As the captain emerged from the straggling end of Waterport
Street, and strode through the flowered paths of the Alameda, he
did not happen to see a figure that dodged behind a
chevaux-de-frise of Spanish bayonet on his approach. Billy Capper,
who had been pacing the gardens for more than an hour, fear
battling with the predatory impulse that urged him to Government
House, watched Captain Woodhouse pass, and his eyes narrowed into a
queer twinkle of oblique humor. So Captain Woodhouse had begun to
play the game—going to report to the governor, eh? The pale
soul of Mr. Capper glowed with a faint flicker of admiration for
this cool bravery far beyond its own capacity to practise. Capper
waited a safe time, then followed, chose a position outside
Government House from which he could see the main entrance, and
waited.

A tall thin East Indian with a narrow ascetic face under his
closely wound white turban, and wearing a native livery of the same
spotless white, answered the captain's summons on the heavy
knocker. He accepted the visitor's card, showed him into a dim
hallway hung with faded arras and coats of chain mail. The Indian,
Jaimihr Khan, gave Captain Woodhouse a start when he returned to
say the governor would receive him in his office. The man had a
tread like a cat's, absolutely noiseless; he moved through the half
light of the hall like a white wraith. His English was spoken
precisely and with a curious mechanical intonation.

Jaimihr Khan threw back heavy double doors and announced,
"Cap-tain Wood-house." He had the doors shut noiselessly almost
before the visitor was through them.

A tall heavy-set man with graying hair and mustache rose from a
broad desk at the right of a large room and advanced with hand
outstretched in cordial welcome.

Woodhouse studied the face of his superior in a swift glance as
he shook hands. A broad full face it was, kindly, intelligent,
perhaps not so alert; as to the set of eyes and mouth as it had
been in younger days when the stripes of service were still to be
won. General Sir George Crandall gave the impression of a man
content to rest on his honors, though scrupulously attentive to the
routine of his position. He motioned the younger man to draw a
chair up to the desk.

"In yesterday on the Princess Mary, I presume, Captain?"

"Yes, General. Didn't report to you on arrival because I thought
it would be quite tea time and I didn't want to disturb—"

"Right!" General Crandall tipped back in his swivel chair and
appraised his new officer with satisfaction. "Everything quiet on
the upper Nile? Germans not tinkering with the Mullah yet to start
insurrection or anything like that?"

"Right as a trivet, sir," Woodhouse answered promptly. "Of
course we're anticipating some such move by the enemy—agents
working in from Erythrea—holy war of a sort, perhaps, but I
think our people have things well in hand."

"And at Wady Haifa, your former commander—" The general
hesitated.

"Major Bronson-Webb, sir," Woodhouse was quick to supply, but
not without a sharp glance at the older man.

"Yes—yes; Bronson-Webb—knew him in Rangoon in the
late nineties—mighty decent chap and a good executive. He's
standing the sun, I warrant."

Captain Woodhouse accepted the cigarette from the general's
extended case.

"No complaint from him at least, General Crandall. We all get
pretty well baked at Wady, I take it."

The governor laughed, and tapped a bell on his desk. Jaimihr
Khan was instantly materialized between the double doors.

"My orderly, Jaimihr," General Crandall ordered, and the doors
were shut once more. The general stretched a hand across the
desk.

"Your papers, please, Captain. I'll receipt your order of
transfer and you'll be a member of our garrison forthwith."

Captain Woodhouse brought a thin sheaf of folded papers from his
breast pocket and passed it to his superior. He kept his eyes
steadily on the general's face as he scanned them.

"This is Captain Woodhouse." General Crandall indicated
Woodhouse, who had risen.

"Kindly conduct him to Major Bishop, who will assign him to
quarters. Captain Woodhouse, we—Lady Crandall and
I—will expect you at Government House soon to make your bow
over the teacup. One of Lady Crandall's inflexible rules for new
recruits, you know. Good day, sir."

Woodhouse, out in the free air again, drew in a long breath and
braced back his shoulders. He accompanied the subaltern over the
trails on the Rock to the quarters of Major Bishop, chief signal
officer, under whom he was to be junior in command. But one regret
marked his first visit to Government House—he had not caught
even a glimpse of the little person calling herself Jane Gerson,
buyer.

But he had missed by a narrow margin. Piloted by Lady Crandall,
Jane had left the vaulted breakfast room for the larger and lighter
library, which Sir George had converted to the purpose of an
office. This room was a sort of holy of holies with Lady Crandall,
to be invaded if the presiding genius could be caught napping or
lulled to complaisance. This morning she had the important
necessity of unobstructed light—not a general commodity about
Government House—to urge in defense of profanation. For her
guest carried under her arm a sheaf of plans—by such sterling
architects of women's fancies as Worth and Doeuillet, and the imp
of envy would not allow the governor's wife to have peace until she
had devoured every pattern. She paused in mock horror at the
threshold of her husband's sanctum.

"But, George, dear, you should be out by this time, you know,"
Lady Crandall expostulated. "Miss Gerson and I have something-oh,
tremendously important to do here." She made a sly gesture of
concealing the bundle of stiff drawing paper she carried. General
Crandall, who had risen at the arrival of the two invaders, made a
show at capturing the plans his wife held behind her back. Jane
bubbled laughter at the spectacle of so exalted a military lion at
play. The general possessed himself of the roll, drew a curled
scroll from it, and gravely studied it.

"Miss Gerson," he said with deliberation, "this looks to me like
a plan of Battery B. I am surprised that you should violate the
hospitality of Government House by doing spy work from its bedroom
windows."

"Foohsh! You've got that upside down for one thing," Lady
Crandall chided. "And besides it's only a chart of what the lady of
Government House hopes soon to wear if she can get the goods from
Holbein's, on Regent Street."

"You see, General Crandall, I'm attacking Government House at
its weakest point," Jane laughed. "Been here less than twelve
hours, and already the most important member of the garrison has
surrendered."

"The American sahib, Reynolds," chanted Jaimihr Khan from the
double doors, and almost at once the breezy consul burst into the
room. He saluted all three with an expansive gesture of the
hands.

"Morning, Governor—morning. Lady Crandall, and same to
you. Miss Gerson. Dear, dear; this is going to be a bad day for me,
and it's just started." The little man was wound up like a sidewalk
top, and he ran on without stopping:

"General Sherman might have got some real force into his remarks
about war if he'd had a job like mine. Miss Gerson—news!
Heard from the Saxonia. Be in harbor some time to-morrow and
leave at six sharp following morning." Jane clapped her hands.
"I've wired for accommodations for all of you—just got the
answer. Rotten accommodations, but—thank Heaven—I won't
be able to hear what you say about me when you're at sea."

"Um—that's what I came to see you about, General
Crandall." He jerked his head around toward the governor with a
birdlike pertness. "What are you going to do with this young lady,
sir?" Jane waited the answer breathlessly.

"Why—um—really, as far as we're concerned," Sir
George answered slowly, "we'd be glad to have her stop here
indefinitely. Don't you agree, Helen?"

"Of course; but—"

"It's this way," the consul interrupted Lady Crandall. "I've
arranged to get Miss Gerson aboard, provided, of course, you
approve."

"You haven't got a cable through regarding her?" the general
asked. "Her passports—lost—lot of red tape, of
course."

"Not a line from Paris even," Reynolds answered. "Miss Gerson
says the ambassador could vouch for her, and—"

"Indeed he could!" Jane started impulsively toward the general.
"It was his wife arranged my motor for me and advanced me
money."

General Crandall looked down into her eager face
indulgently.

"You really are very anxious to sail, Miss Gerson?"

"General Crandall, I'm not very good at these
please-spare-my-lover speeches," the girl began, her lips
tremulous. "But it means a lot to me—to go; my job, my
career. I've fought my way this far, and here I am—and
there's the sea out there. If I can't step aboard the
Saxonia Friday morning it—it will break my heart."

Gibraltar's master honed his chin thoughtfully for a minute.

"Um—I'm sure I don't want to break anybody's
heart—not at my age, miss. I see no good reason why I should
not let you go if nothing happens meanwhile to make me change my
mind." He beamed good humor on her.

"Bless you, General," she cried. "Hildebrand's will mention you
in its advertisements."

"Heaven forbid!" General Crandall cried in real
perturbation.

Jane turned to Lady Crandall and took both her hands.

"Come to my room," she urged, with an air of mystery. "You know
that Doeuillet evening gown—the one in blue? It's yours, Lady
Crandall. I'd give another to the general if he'd wear it. Now one
fitting and—"

Her voice was drowned by Lady Crandall's: "You dear!"

"Be at the dock at five A. M. Friday to see you and the others
off. Miss Gerson," Reynolds called after her. "Must go
now—morning crowd of busted citizens waiting at the consulate
to be fed. Ta-ta!" Reynolds collided with Jaimihr Khan at the
double doors.

"A young man who wishes to see you. General Sahib. He will give
no name, but he says a promise you made to see him—by
telephone an hour ago."

"Show Mr. Reynolds out, Jaimihr!" the general ordered. "Then you
may bring the young man in."

Mr. Billy Capper, who had, in truth, telephoned to Government
House and secured the privilege of an interview even before the
arrival of Woodhouse to report, and had paced the paths of the
Alameda since, blowing hot and cold on his resolutions, followed
the soft-footed Indian into the presence of General Crandall. The
little spy was near a state of nervous breakdown. Following the
surprising and unexpected collapse of his plan to do a murder, he
had spent a wakeful and brandy-punctuated night, his brain on the
rack. His desire to play informer, heightened now a hundredfold by
the flaying tongue of Louisa, was almost balanced by his fears of
resultant consequences. Cupidity, the old instinct for preying,
drove him to impart to the governor-general of Gibraltar
information which, he hoped, would be worth its weight in gold;
Louisa's promise of a party de deux before a firing squad, which he
knew in his heart she would be capable of arranging in a desperate
moment, halted him. After screwing up his courage to the point of
telephoning for an appointment, Capper had wallowed in fear. He
dared not stay away from Government House then for fear of arousing
suspicion; equally he dared not involve the girl from the
Wilhelmstrasse lest he find himself tangled in his own mesh.

At the desperate moment of his introduction to General Crandall,
Capper determined to play it safe and see how the chips fell. His
heart quailed as he heard the doors shut behind him.

"Awfully good of you to see me," he babbled as he stood before
the desk, turning his hat brim through his fingers like a prayer
wheel.

General Crandall bade him be seated. "I haven't forgotten you
did me a service in Burma," he added.

"You're not with the Brussels secret-service people any longer,
then?"

The question hit Capper hard. His fingers fluttered to his
lips.

"No, General. They—er—let me go. Suppose you heard
that—and a lot of other things about me. That I was a
rotter—that I drank—"

"What I heard was not altogether complimentary," the other
answered judiciously. "I trust it was untrue."

Capper's embarrassment increased.

"Well, to tell the truth, General Crandall—ah—I did
go to pieces for a time. I've been playing a pretty short string
for the last two years. But"—he broke off his whine in a
sudden accession of passion—"they can't keep me down much
longer. I'm going to show 'em!"

General Crandall looked his surprise.

"General, I'm an Englishman. You know that. I may be down and
out, and my old friends may not know me when we meet—but I'm
English. And I'm loyal!" Capper was getting a grip on himself; he
thought the patriotic line a safe one to play with the commander of
a fortress.

"Yes—yes. I don't question that, I'm sure," the general
grunted, and he began to riffle some papers on his desk
petulantly.

Capper pressed home his point. "I just want you to keep that in
mind, General, while I talk. Just remember I'm English—and
loyal."

The governor nodded impatiently.

Capper leaned far over the desk, and began in an eager
whisper:

"General, remember Cook—that chap in Rangoon—the
polo player?" The other looked blank. "Haven't forgotten him,
General? How he lived in Burma two years, mingling with the
English, until one day somebody discovered his name was Koch and
that he was a mighty unhealthy chap to have about the
fortifications. Surely—"

"Yes, I remember him now. But what—"

"There was Hollister, too. You played billiards in your club
with Hollister, I fancy. Thought him all right, too—until a
couple of secret-service men walked into the club one day and
clapped handcuffs on him. Remember that, General?"

The commander exclaimed snappishly that he could not see his
visitor's drift.

"I'm just refreshing your memory, General," Capper hastened to
reassure. "Just reminding you that there isn't much difference
between a German and an Englishman, after all—if the German
wants to play the Englishman and knows his book. He can fool a lot
of us."

"Granted. But I don't see what all this has to do
with—"

"Listen, General!" Capper was trembling in his eagerness. "I'm
just in from Alexandria—came on the Princess Mary. There was
an Englishman aboard, bound for Gib. Name was Captain Woodhouse, of
the signal service."

"Quite right. What of that?" General Crandall looked up
suspiciously.

"Have you seen Captain Woodhouse, General?"

"Not a half hour ago. He called to report."

"Seemed all right to you—this Woodhouse?" Capper eyed the
other's face narrowly.

"Of course. Why not?"

"Remember Cook, General! Remember Hollister!" Capper warned.

General Crandall exploded irritably: "What the devil do you
mean? What are you driving at, man?"

The little spy leaped to his feet in his excitement and thrust
his weasel face far across the desk.

"What do I mean? I mean this chap who calls himself Woodhouse
isn't Woodhouse at all. He's a German spy—from the
Wilhemstrasse—with a number from the Wilhelmstrasse! He's on
the Rock to do a spy's work!"

"Pshaw! Why did Brussels let you go?" General Crandall tipped
back in his seat and cast an amused glance at the flushed face
before him.

Capper shook his head doggedly. "I'm not drunk, General
Crandall. I'm so broke I couldn't get drunk if I would. So help me,
I'm telling God's truth. I got it straight—"

Capper checked his tumult of words, and did some rapid thinking.
How much did he dare reveal! "In Alexandria, General—got it
there—from the inside, sir. Koch is the head of the
Wilhelmstrasse crowd there—the same Cook you knew in Rangoon;
he engineered the trick. The wildest dreams of the Wilhelmstrasse
have come true. They've got a man in your signal tower,
General—in your signal tower!"

General Crandall, in whom incredulity was beginning to give way
to the first faint glimmerings of conviction as to the possibility
of truth in the informer's tale, rallied himself nevertheless to
combat an aspersion cast on a British officer.

"Suppose the Germans have a spy in my signal tower or anywhere
here," he began argumentatively. "Suppose they learn every nook and
corner of the Rock—have the caliber and range of every gun in
our defense; they couldn't capture Gibraltar in a thousand
years."

"I don't know what they want," Capper returned, with the injured
air of a man whose worth fails of recognition. "I only came here to
warn you that your Captain Woodhouse is taking orders from
Berlin."

"Come—come, man! Give me some proof to back up this
cock-and-bull story," General Crandall snapped. He had risen, and
was pacing nervously back and forth.

Capper was secretly elated at this sign that his story had
struck home. He stilled the fluttering of his hands by an effort,
and tried to bring his voice to the normal.

"Here it is, General—all I've got of the story. The real
Woodhouse comes down from somewhere up in the Nile—I don't
know where—and puts up for the night in Alexandria to wait
for the Princess Mary. No friends in the town, you know; nowhere to
visit. Three Wilhelmstrasse men in Alexandria, headed by that
clever devil Cook, or Koch, who calls himself a doctor now. Somehow
they get hold of the real Woodhouse and do for him—what I
don't know—probably kill the poor devil.

"General, I saw with my own eyes an unconscious British officer
being carried away from Koch's house in Ramleh in an
automobile—two men with him." Capper fixed the governor with
a lean index finger dramatically. "And I saw the man you just this
morning received as Captain Woodhouse leave Doctor Koch's house
five minutes after that poor devil—the real
Woodhouse—had been carried off. That's the reason I took the
same boat with him to Gibraltar, General Crandall—because I'm
loyal and it was my duty to warn you."

"Incredible!"

"One thing more, General." Capper was sorely tempted, but for
the minute his wholesome fear of consequences curbed his tongue.
"Woodhouse isn't working alone on the Rock; you can be sure of
that. He's got friends to help him turn whatever trick he's
after—maybe in this very house. They're clever people, you
can mark that down on your slate!"

"Ridiculous!" The keeper of the Rock was fighting not to believe
now. "Why, I tell you if they had a hundred of their spies inside
the lines—if they knew the Rock as well as I do they could
never take it."

Capper rose wearily, the air of a misunderstood man on him.

"Perhaps they aren't trying to capture it. I know nothing about
that. Well—I've done my duty—as one Englishman to
another. I hope I've told you in time. I'll be going now."

General Crandall swung on him sharply. "Where are you going?" he
demanded.

Capper shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. Now was the minute
he'd been counting on—the peeling of crackling notes from a
fat bundle, the handsome words of appreciation. Surely General
Crandall was ripe.

"Well, General, frankly—I'm broke. Haven't a shilling to
bless myself with. I thought perhaps—" Capper shot a keen
glance at the older man's face, which was partly turned from him.
The general appeared to be pondering. He turned abruptly on the
spy.

"A few drinks and you might talk," he challenged.

Capper grinned deprecatively. "I don't know, General—I
might," he murmured. "I've been away from the drink so long
that—"

"Where do you want to go?" General Crandall cut him off. "Of
course, you don't want to stay here indefinitely."

"Well—if I had a bit of money—they tell me
everybody's broke in Paris. Millionaires—and everybody, you
know. You can get a room at the Ritz for the asking. That would be
heaven for me—if I had something in my pocket."

"You want to go to Paris, eh?" General Crandall stepped closer
to Capper, and his eyes narrowed in scorn.

"If it could be arranged, yes, General." Capper was spinning the
brim of his bowler between nervous fingers. He did not dare meet
the other's glance.

"So help me, General, I came here to tell you the truth. I want
to go to Paris—or anywhere away from here; I'll admit that.
But that had nothing to do with my coming all the way here from
Alexandria—spending my last guinea on a steamer
ticket—to warn you of your danger.

I'm an Englishman and—loyal!" Capper was pleading now. All
hope of reward had sped and the vision of a cell with subsequent
investigations into his own record appalled him. General Crandall
sat down at his desk and began to write.

"I don't know—at any rate, I can't have you talking around
here. You're going to Paris."

Capper dropped his hat. At a tap of the bell, Jaimihr Khan
appeared at the doors, so suddenly that one might have said he was
right behind them all the time. General Crandall directed that his
orderly be summoned. When the subaltern appeared, the general
handed him a sealed note.

"Orderly, turn this gentleman over to Sergeant Crosby at once,"
he commanded, "and give the sergeant this note." Then to Capper:
"You will cross to Algeciras, where you will be put on a train for
Madrid. You will have a ticket for Paris and twenty shillings for
expense en route. You will be allowed to talk to no one alone
before you leave Gibraltar, and under no circumstances will you be
allowed to return—not while I am governor-general, at
least."

Capper, his face alight with new-found joy, turned to pass out
with the orderly. He paused at the doorway to frame a speech of
thanks, but General Crandall's back was toward him. "Paris!" he
sighed in rapture, and the doors closed behind him.

"NOW YOU know, my dear, Cynthia Maxwell is simply
going to die with envy when she sees me in this!"

The plump, little mistress of Government House, standing before
a full-length mirror, in her boudoir, surveyed herself with intense
satisfaction. Her arms and neck burst startlingly from the clinging
sheath of the incomparable Doeuillet gown that was Jane Gerson's
douceur for official protection; in the flood of morning light
pouring through the mullioned windows Lady Crandall seemed a pink
and white—and somewhat florid—lily in bloom out of
time. Hildebrand's buyer, on her knees and with deft fingers busy
with the soft folds of the skirt, answered through a mouthful of
pins:

"Poor Cynthia; my heart goes out to her." "Oh, it needn't!" Lady
Crandall answered, with a tilting of her strictly Iowa style nose.
"The Maxwell person has made me bleed more than once here on the
Rock with the gowns a fond mama sends her from Paris. But,
honestly, isn't this a bit low for a staid middle-aged person like
myself? I'm afraid I'll have trouble getting my precious Doeuillet
past the censor." Lady Crandall plumed herself with secret joy.

Jane looked up, puzzled.

"Oh, that's old Lady Porter—a perfect dragon," the
general's wife rattled on. "Poor old dear; she thinks the Lord put
her on the Rock for a purpose. Her own collars get higher and
higher. I believe if she ever was presented at court she'd emulate
the old Scotch lady who followed the law of decollete, but
preserved her self-respect by wearing a red flannel chest
protector. You must meet her."

"I'm afraid I won't have time to get a look at your dragon,"
Jane returned, with a little laugh, all happiness. "Now that Sir
George has promised me I can sail on the Saxonia
Friday—"

"You really must—" The envious eyes of Lady Crandall fell
on the pile of plans—potent Delphic mysteries to charm the
heart of woman—that lay scattered about upon the floor.

Jane sat back on her heels and surveyed the melting folds of
satin with an artist's eye.

"If you only knew—what it means to me to get back with my
baskets full of French beauties! Why, when I screwed up my courage
two months ago to go to old Hildebrand and ask him to send me
abroad as his buyer—I'd been studying drawing and French at
nights for three years in preparation, you see—he roared like
the dear old lion he is and said I was too young. But I cooed and
pleaded, and at last he said I could come—on trial, and
so—"

"He'll purr like a pussy-cat when you get back," Lady Crandall
put in, with a pat on the brown head at her knees.

"Maybe. If I can slip into New York with my little baskets while
all the other buyers are still over here, cabling tearfully for
money to get home or asking their firms to send a warship to fetch
them—why, I guess the pennant's mine all right."

The eternal feminine, so strong in Iowa's transplanted stock,
prompted a mischievous question:

"Then you won't be leaving somebody behind when you
sail—somebody who seemed awfully nice and—foreigny and
all that? All our American girls find the moonlight over on this
side infectious. Witness me—a 'finishing trip' abroad after
school days—and see where I've finished—on a Rock!"
Lady Crandall bubbled laughter. A shrewd downward sweep of her eye
was just in time to catch a flush mounting to Jane's cheeks.

"Well, a Mysterious Stranger has crossed my path," Jane
admitted. "He was very nice, but mysterious."

"Oh!" A delighted gurgle from the older woman. "Tell me all
about it—a secret for these ancient walls to hear."

Jane was about to reply when second thought checked her tongue.
Before her flashed that strange meeting with Captain Woodhouse the
night before—his denial of their former meeting, followed by
his curious insistence on her keeping faith with him by not
revealing the fact of their acquaintance. She had
promised—why she had promised she could no more divine than
the reason for his asking; but a promise it was that she would not
betray his confidence. More than once since that minute in the
reception room of the Hotel Splendide Jane Gerson had reviewed the
whole baffling circumstance in her mind and a growing resentment at
this stranger's demand, as well as at her own compliance with it,
was rising in her heart. Still, this Captain Woodhouse was
"different," and—this Jane sensed without effort to
analyze—the mystery which he threw about himself but served
to set him apart from the common run of men. She evaded Lady
Crandall's probing with a shrug of the shoulders.

"It's a secret which I myself do not know. Lady
Crandall—and never will."

Back to the o'erweening lure of the gown the flitting fancy of
the general's lady betook itself.

"You—don't think this is a shade too young for me, Miss
Gerson?" Anxiety pleaded to be quashed.

"Nonsense!" Jane laughed.

"But I'm no chicken, my dear. If you would look me up in our
family Bible back in Davenport you'd find—"

"People don't believe everything they read in the Bible any
more," Jane assured her. "Your record and Jonah's would both be
open to doubt."

"You're very comforting," Lady Crandall beamed. Her maid knocked
and entered on the lady's crisp: "Come!"

"The general wishes to see you. Lady Crandall, in the
library."

"Tell the general I'm in the midst of trying on—" Lady
Crandall began, then thought better of her excuse. She dropped the
shimmering gown from her shoulders and slipped into a kimono.

"Some stuffy plan for entertaining somebody or other, my
dear"—this to Jane. "The real burden of being
governor-general of the Rock falls on the general's wife. Just slip
into your bonnet, and when I'm back we'll take that little stroll
through the Alameda I've promised you for this morning." She
clutched her kimono about her and whisked out of the room.

General Crandall, just rid of the dubious pleasure of Billy
Capper's company, was pacing the floor of the library office
thoughtfully. He looked up with a smile at his wife's entrance.

"Helen, I want you to do something for me," he said.

"Certainly, dear." Lady Crandall was not an unpleasing picture
of ripe beauty to look on, in the soft drape of her Japanese robe.
Even in his worry. General Crandall found himself intrigued for the
minute.

"There's a new chap in the signal service—just in from
Egypt—name's Woodhouse. I wish you would invite him to tea,
my dear."

"Of course; any day."

"This afternoon, if you please, Helen," the general
followed.

His wife looked slightly puzzled.

"This afternoon? But, George, dear, isn't that—aren't
you—ah—rushing this young man to have him up to
Government House so soon after his arrival?" She suddenly
remembered something that caused her to reverse herself. "Besides,
I've asked him to dinner—the dinner I'm to give the Americans
to-morrow night before they sail."

General Crandall looked his surprise.

"You didn't tell me that. I didn't know you had met him."

"Just happened to," Lady Crandall cut in hastily. "Met him at
the Hotel Splendide last night when I brought Miss Gerson home with
me."

"What was Woodhouse doing at the Splendide?" the general asked
suspiciously.

"Why, spending the night, you foolish boy. Just off the Princess
Mary, he was. I believe he did Miss Gerson some sort of a
service—and I met him in that way—quite
informally."

"Did Miss Gerson—a service—hum!"

"Oh, a trifling thing! It seemed she had only French money, and
that cautious Aimer fellow wouldn't accept it. Captain Woodhouse
gave her English gold for it—to pay her bill. But
why—"

"Has Miss Gerson seen him since?" General Crandall asked
sharply.

"Why, George, dear, how could she? We haven't been up from the
breakfast table an hour."

"Woodhouse was here less than an hour ago to pay his duty call
and report," he explained. "I thought perhaps he might have met our
guest somewhere in the garden as he was coming or going."

"He did send her some lovely roses." Lady Crandall brightened at
this, to her, patent inception of a romance; she doted on romances.
"They were in Miss Gerson's room before she was down to
breakfast."

"Roses, eh? And they met informally at the Splendide only last
night." Suspicion was weighing the general's words. "Isn't that a
bit sudden? I say, do you think Miss Gerson and this Captain
Woodhouse had met somewhere before last night?"

"I hardly think so—she on her first trip to the Continent
and he coming from Egypt. But—"

"No matter. I want him here to tea this afternoon." The general
dismissed the subject and turned to his desk. His lady's curiosity
would not be so lightly turned away.

"All these questions—aren't they rather absurd? Is
anything wrong?" She ran up to him and laid her hands on his
shoulders.

"Of course not, dear." He kissed her lightly on the brow. "Now
run along and play with that new gown Miss Gerson gave you. I
imagine that's the most important thing on the Rock to-day."

Lady Crandall gave her soldier-husband a peck on each cheek, and
slapped back to her room. When he was alone again. General Crandall
resumed his restless pacing. Resolution suddenly crystallized, and
he stepped to the desk telephone. He called a number.

"That you. Bishop?...General Crandall speaking...Bishop, you were
here on the Rock seven years ago?...Good!...Pretty good memory for names and faces,
eh?...Right!...I want you to come to Government House for tea at five
this afternoon...But run over for a little talk with me
some time earlier—an hour from now, say. Rather
important...You'll be here...Thank you."

General Crandall sat at his desk and tried to bring himself
down to the routine crying from accumulated papers there. But the
canker Billy Capper had implanted in his mind would not give him
peace. Major-general Crandall was a man cast in the stolid British
mold; years of army discipline and tradition of the service had
given to his conservatism a hard grain. In common with most of
those in high command, he held to the belief that nothing
existed—nothing could exist—which was not down in the
regulations of the war office, made and provided. For upward of
twenty-five years he had played the hard game of the
service—in Egypt, in Burma, on the broiling rocks of Aden,
and here, at last, on the key to the Mediterranean. During all
those years he had faithfully pursued his duty, had stowed away in
his mind the wisdom disseminated in blue-bound books by that
corporate paragon of knowledge at home, the war office. But never
had he read in anything but fluffy fiction of a place or a thing
called the Wilhelmstrasse, reputed by the scriveners to be the
darkest closet and the most potent of all the secret chambers of
diplomacy. The regulations made no mention of a Wilhelmstrasse,
even though they provided the brand of pipe clay that should
brighten men's pith helmets and stipulated to the ounce an
emergency ration. Therefore, to the official military mind at
least, the Wilhelmstrasse was non-existent.

But here comes a beach-comber, a miserable jackal from the back
alleys of society, and warns the governor-general of the Rock that
he has a man from the Wilhelmstrasse—a spy bent on some
unfathomable mission—in his very forces on the Rock. He says
that an agent of the enemy has dared masquerade as a British
officer in order to gain admission inside the lines of Europe's
most impregnable fortress, England's precious stronghold, there to
do mischief!

General Crandall's tremendous responsibility would not permit
him to ignore such a warning, coming even from so low a source. Yet
the man found himself groping blindly in the dark before the
dilemma presented; he had no foot rule of precept or experience to
guide him.

His fruitless searching for a prop in emergency was broken by
the appearance of Jane Gerson in the door opening from Lady
Crandall's rooms to the right of the library. The girl was dressed
for the out-of-doors; in her arms was a fragrant bunch of blood-red
roses, spraying out from the top of a bronze bowl. The girl
hesitated and drew back in confusion at seeing the room occupied;
she seemed eager to escape undetected. But General Crandall
smilingly checked her flight.

"I—I thought you would be out," Jane stammered,
"and—"

"And the posies—" the general interrupted.

"Were for you to enjoy when you should come back." She smiled
easily into the man's eyes. "They'll look so much prettier here
than in my room."

"Very good of you, I'm sure." General Crandall stepped up to the
rich cluster of buds and sniffed critically. Without looking at the
girl, he continued: "It appears to me as though you had already
made a conquest on the Rock. One doesn't pick these from the
cliffs, you know."

"I should hardly call it a conquest," Jane answered, with a
sprightly toss of her head.

"But a young man sent you these flowers. Come—confess!"
The general's tone was bantering, but his eyes did not leave the
piquant face under the chic summer straw hat that shaded it.

"Surely. One of your own men—Captain Woodhouse, of the
signal service." Jane was rearranging the stems in the bowl,
apparently ready to accept what was on the surface of the general's
rallying.

"Woodhouse, eh? You've known him for a long time, I take
it."

"Since last night, General. And yet some people say Englishmen
are slow." She laughed gaily and turned to face him. His voice took
on a subtle quality of polite insistence:

"Surely you met him somewhere before Gibraltar."

"How could I, when this is the first time Captain Woodhouse has
been out of Egypt for years?"

"Who told you that?" The general was quick to catch her up. The
girl felt a swift stab of fear. On the instant she realized that
here was somebody attempting to drive into the mystery which she
herself could not understand, but which she had pledged herself to
keep inviolate. Her voice fluttered in her throat as she
answered:

"Why, he did himself, General."

"He did, eh? Gave you a bit of his history on first meeting.
Confiding chap, what! But you, Miss Gerson—you've been to
Egypt, you say?"

"No, General."

Jane was beginning to find this cross-examination distinctly
painful. She felt that already her pledge, so glibly given at
Captain Woodhouse's insistence, was involving her in a situation
the significance of which might prove menacing to herself—and
one other. She could sense the beginnings of a strain between
herself and this genial elderly gentleman, her host.

"You're at liberty to think anything you like, General—the
truth or otherwise." Her answer, though given smilingly, had a
sting behind it.

"I'm not going to think much longer. I'm going to know!" He
clapped his lips shut over the last word with a smack of
authority.

"Are you really, General Crandall?" The girl's eyes hardened
just perceptibly. He took a turn of the room and paused, facing
her. The situation pleased him no more than it did his breezy
guest, but he knew his duty and doggedly pursued it.

"Come—come. Miss Gerson! I believe you're straightforward
and sincere or I wouldn't be wasting my time this way. I'll be the
same with you. This is a time of war; you understand all that
implies, I hope. A serious question concerning Captain Woodhouse's
position here has arisen. If you have met him before—as I
think you have—it will be to your advantage to tell me where
and when. I am in command of the Rock, you know."

He finished with an odd tenseness of tone that conveyed
assurance of his authority even more than did the sense of his
words. His guest, her back to the table on which the roses rested
and her hands bracing her by their tense grip on the table edge,
sought his eyes boldly.

"General Crandall," she began, "my training in Hildebrand's
store hasn't made me much of a diplomat. All this war and intrigue
makes me dizzy. But I know one thing: this isn't my war, or my
country's, and I'm going to follow my country's example and keep
out of it."

General Crandall shrugged his shoulders and smiled at the girl's
defiance.

"Maybe your country may not be able to do that," he declared,
with a touch of solemnity. "I pray God it may. But I'm afraid your
resolution will not hold, Miss Gerson."

"I'm going to try to make it, anyway," she answered.

Gibraltar's commander, baffled thus by a neutral—a neutral
fair to look on, in the bargain—tried another tack. He
assumed the fatherly air.

"Lady Crandall and I have tried to show you we were
friends—tried to help you get home," he began.

"You've been very good to me," Jane broke in feelingly.

"What I say now is spoken as a friend, not as governor of the
Rock. If it is true that you have met Woodhouse before—and
our conversation here verifies my suspicion—that very fact
makes his word worthless and releases you from any promise you may
have made not to reveal this and what you may know about him. Also
it should put you on your guard—his motives in any attentions
he may pay you can not be above suspicion."

"I think that is a personal matter I am perfectly capable of
handling." Jane's resentment sent the flags to her cheeks.

General Crandall was quick to back-water: "Yes, yes! Don't
misunderstand me. What I mean to say is—"

He was interrupted by his wife's voice calling for Jane from the
near-by room. Anticipating her interruption, he hurried on:

"For the present. Miss Gerson, we'll drop this matter. I said a
few minutes ago I intended shortly to—know. I hope I won't
have to carry out that—threat."

Jane was withdrawing one of the buds from the jar. At his last
word, she dropped it with a little gasp.

"Threat, General?"

"I hope not. Truly I hope not. But, young woman—"

She stooped, picked up the flower, and was setting it in his
buttonhole before he could remonstrate.

"This one was for you, General," she said, and the truce was
sealed. That minute, Lady Crandall was wafted into the room on the
breeze of her own staccato interruption.

"What's this—what's this! Flirting with poor old
George—pinning a rose on my revered husband when my back's
turned? Brazen miss. I'm here to take you off to the gardens at
once, where you can find somebody younger—and not near so
dear—to captivate with your tricks. At once, now!"

She had her arm through Jane's and was marching her off. An
exchange of glances between the governor and Hildebrand's young
diplomat of the dollar said that what had passed between them was a
confidence.

Jaimihr Khan announced Major Bishop to the general a short time
later. The major, a rotund pink-faced man of forty, who had the
appearance of being ever tubbed and groomed to the pink of parade
perfection, saluted his superior informally, accepted a cigarette
and crossed his plump legs in an easy chair near the general's
desk. General Crandall folded his arms on his desk and went direct
to his subject:

"Major, you were here on the Rock seven years ago, you say?"

"Here ten years, General. Regular rock
scorpion—old-timer."

"Do you happen to recall this chap Woodhouse whom I sent to you
to report for duty in the signal tower to-day? Has transfer papers
from Wady Haifa."

"Haven't met him yet, though Captain Carson tells me he reported
at my office a little more than an hour ago—see him after
parade. Woodhouse—Woodhouse..." The major propped his
chin on his fingers in thought.

"His papers—army record and all that—say he was here
on the Rock for three months in the spring of nineteen-seven,"
General Crandall urged, to refresh the other's memory.

Major Bishop stroked his round cheeks, tugged at one ear, but
found recollection difficult.

"When I see the chap—so many coming and going, you know.
Three months—bless me! That's a thin slice out of ten
years."

"Major, I'm going to take you into my confidence," the senior
officer began; then he related the incident of Capper's visit and
repeated the charge he had made. Bishop sat aghast at the word
"spy."

"Woodhouse will be here to tea this afternoon," continued
Crandall. "While you and I ask him a few leading questions, I'll
have Jaimihr, my Indian, search his room in barracks. I trust
Jaimihr implicitly, and he can do the job smoothly. Now, Bishop,
what do you remember about nineteen-seven—something we can
lead up to in conversation, you know?"

The younger man knuckled his brow for a minute, then looked up
brightly.

"I say, General, Craigen was governor then.
But—um—aren't you a bit—mild; this asking of a
suspected spy to tea?"

"What can I do?" the other replied, somewhat testily. "I can't
clap an officer of his majesty's army into prison on the mere
say-so of a drunken outcast who has no proof to offer. I must go
slowly, Major. Watch for a slip from this Woodhouse. One bad move
on his part, and he starts on his way to face a firing squad."

Bishop had risen and was slowly pacing the room, his eyes on the
walls, hung with many portraits in oils.

"Well, you can't help admiring the nerve of the chap," he
muttered, half to himself. "Forcing his way on to the
Rock—why, he might as well put his head in a cannon's
mouth."

"I haven't time to admire," the general said shortly. "Thing to
do is to act."

"Quite right. Nineteen-seven, eh? Um—"

He paused before the portrait of a young woman in a Gainsborough
hat and with a sparkling piquant face. "By George, General, why not
try him on Lady Evelyn? There's a fair test for you, now!"

"You mean Craigen's wife?" The general looked up at the portrait
quizzically. "Skeleton's bones. Bishop."

"Right; but no man who ever saw her could forget. I know I never
can. Poor Craigen!"

MR. JOSEPH AIMER, proprietor of the Hotel
Splendide, on Waterport Street, was absorbed, heart and soul, in a
curious task. He was emptying the powder from two-grain quinine
capsules on to a sheet of white letter paper on his desk.

It was noon of Wednesday, the day following the arrival of
Captain Woodhouse. Aimer was alone in the hotel's reception room
and office behind the dingy glass partially enclosing his desk. His
alpaca-covered shoulders were close to his ears; and his bald head,
with its stripes of plastered hair running like thick lines of
latitude on a polished globe, was held far forward so as to bring
his eyes on the work in hand. Like some plump magpie he appeared,
turning over bits of china in a treasure hole.

A round box of the gelatine cocoons lay at his left hand; it had
just been delivered by an Arab boy, quick to pick up the street
commission for a tuppence. Very methodically Aimer picked the
capsules from the box one by one, opened them, and spilled the
quinine in a little heap under his nose. He grunted peevishly when
the sixth shell had been emptied. The seventh capsule brought an
eager whistle to his lips. When he had jerked the concentric halves
apart, very little powder fell out. Instead, the thin, folded edges
of a pellet of rice paper protruded from one of the containers.
This Aimer had extracted in an instant. He spread it against the
black back of a ledger and read the very fine script written
thereon. This was the message:

"Danger. An informer from Alexandria has denounced our two
friends to Crandall. You must warn; I can not."

The spy's heart was suddenly drained, and the wisp of paper in
his hand trembled so that it scattered the quinine about in a thin
cloud. Once more he read the note, then held a match to it and
scuffed its feathery ash with his feet into the rug beneath his
stool. The fortitude which had held Joseph Aimer to the Rock in the
never-failing hope that some day would bring him the opportunity'
to do a great service for the fatherland came near crumbling that
minute. He groaned.

"Our friends," he whispered, "Woodhouse and
Louisa—trapped!"

The warning in the note left nothing open to ambiguity for
Aimer; there were but four of them—"friends" under the
Wilhelmstrasse fellowship of danger—there in Gibraltar:
Louisa, the man who passed as Woodhouse, and whose hand was to
execute the great coup when the right moment came, himself, and
that other one whose place was in Government House itself. From
this latter the note of warning had come. How desperate the
necessity for it Aimer could guess when he took into reckoning the
dangers that beset any attempt at communication on the writer's
part. So narrow the margin of safety for this "friend" that he must
look at each setting sun as being reasonably the last for him.

Aimer did not attempt to go behind the note and guess who was
the informer that had lodged information with the
governor-general.

He had forgotten, in fact, the incident of the night before,
when the blustering Capper called the newly arrived Woodhouse by
name. The flash of suspicion that attached responsibility to the
American girl named Gerson was dissipated as quickly as it came;
she had arrived by motor from Paris, not on the boat from
Alexandria. His was now the imperative duty to carry warning to the
two suspected, not to waste time in idle speculation as to the
identity of the betrayer. There was but one ray of hope in this
sudden pall of gloom, and that Aimer grasped eagerly. He knew the
character of General Crandall—the phlegmatic conservatism of
the man, which would not easily be jarred out of an accustomed line
of thought and action. The general would be slow to leap at an
accusation brought against one wearing the stripes of service; and,
though he might reasonably attempt to test Captain Woodhouse, one
such as Woodhouse, chosen by the Wilhelmstrasse to accomplish so
great a mission, would surely have the wit to parry suspicion.

Yes, he must be put on his guard. As for Louisa—well, it
would be too bad if the girl should have to put her back against a
wall; but she could be spared; she was not essential. After he had
succeeded in getting word of his danger to Woodhouse, Aimer would
consider saving Louisa from a firing squad. The nimble mind of Herr
Aimer shook itself free from the incubus of dread and leaped to the
exigency of the moment. Calling his head waiter to keep warm the
chair behind the desk, Aimer retired to his room, and there was
exceedingly busy for half an hour.

The hour of parade during war time on Gibraltar was one o'clock.
At that time, six days a week, the half of the garrison not
actually in fighting position behind the great guns of the defense
marched to the parade grounds down by the race track and there went
through the grilling regimen that meant perfection and the
maintenance of a hair-trigger state of efficiency. Down from the
rocky eminences where the barracks stood, marched this day block
after block of olive-drab fighting units—artillerymen for the
most part, equipped with the rifle and pack of infantrymen. No
blare of brass music gave the measure to their step; bandsmen in
this time of reality paced two by two, stretchers carried between
them. All the curl and snap of silken banners that made the parade
a moving spectacle in ordinary times was absent; flags do not
figure in the grim modern business of warfare. Just those solid
blocks of men trained to kill, sweeping down on to the level
grounds and massing, rank on rank, for inspection and the
trip-hammer pound-pound-pound of evolutions to follow. Silent
integers of power, flexing their muscles for the supreme test that
any morning's sun might bring.

Mr. Henry J. Sherman stood with his wife, Kitty and Willy
Kimball—Kimball had developed a surprising interest in one of
these home folks, at least—under the shade of the row of
plane trees fringing the parade grounds. They tried to persuade
themselves that they were seeing something worth while. This
pleasing fiction wore thin with Mr. Sherman before fifteen minutes
had passed.

"Shucks, mother! The boys at the national guard encampment down
to Galesburg fair last year made a better showing than this." He
pursed out his lips and regarded a passing battalion with a
critical eye.

"But, my dear Mrs. Sherman"—Willy Kimball flicked his
handkerchief from his cuff and fluttered it across his coat sleeve,
where dust had fallen—"the guards back in the States are play
soldiers, you know; these chaps, here—well, they are the real
thing. They don't dress up like picture-book soldiers and show
off—"

"Play soldiers—huh!" Henry J. had fire in his eye, and the
pearl buttons on his white linen waistcoat creaked with the
swelling of a patriot's pride. "You've been a long time from home,
Willy. Perhaps you've forgotten that your own father was at
Corinth. Guess you've overlooked that soldiers' monument in
Courthouse Square back in little old Kewanee. They were 'play
soldiers,' eh?—those boys who marched away with your dad in
sixty-one. Gimme a regiment of those old boys in blue, and they
could lick this whole bunch of—"

"Father!" Kitty had flipped her hand over her parent's mouth,
her eyes round with real fear. "You'll get arrested again, talking
that way here where everybody can hear you. Remember what that
hotel man said last night about careless remarks about military
things on the Rock? Be good, father."

"There, there!" Sherman removed the monitory hand and patted it
reassuringly. "I forgot. But when I get aboard the Saxonia
and well out to sea, I'm going to just bust information about what
I think of things in general over here in this Europe
place—their Bottycelly pictures and their broken-down
churches and—and why, bless my soul! The little store buyer
and that Iowa girl who's married to the governor here!"

The patriot stopped short in his review of the Continent's
delinquencies to wave his hat at Lady Crandall and Jane Gerson, who
were trundling down under the avenue of planes in a smart dog-cart.
Lady Crandall answered his hail with a flourish of her whip, turned
her horse off the road, and brought her conveyance to a stop by the
group of exiles. Hearty greetings passed around. The governor's
wife showed her unaffected pleasure at the meeting.

"I thought you wouldn't miss the parade," she called down from
her high seat. "Only thing that moves on the Rock—these daily
reviews. Brought Miss Gerson down here so when she gets back to New
York she can say she's seen the defenders of Gibraltar, if not in
action, at least doing their hard training for it."

"Well, I don't mind tellin' you," Sherman began defiantly, "I
think the national guard of Illynoy can run circles around these
Englishmen when it comes to puttin' up a show. Now, Kitty, don't
you try to drive a plug in your dad's sentiments again; Mrs.
Crandall's all right—one of us." A shocked look from his
daughter. "Oh, there I go again, forgettin'. Lady Crandall, I mean.
Excuse me, ma'am."

"Don't you dare apologize," the governor's wife playfully
threatened Mr. Sherman with her whip. "I love the sound of good,
old-fashioned 'Missis.' Just imagine—married five years, and
nobody has called me 'Mrs. Crandall' until you did just now.
'Wedded, But Not a Missis'; wouldn't that be a perfectly gorgeous
title for a Laura Jean novel? Miss Gerson, let's hop out and join
these home folks; they're my kind."

The burst of laughter that greeted Lady Crandall's sally was not
over before she had leaped nimbly from her high perch, Henry J.
gallantly assisting. Jane followed, and the coachman from his
little bob seat in the back drove the dog-cart over the road to
wait his mistress' pleasure. The scattered blocks of olive-gray on
the field had coalesced into a solid regiment now, and the long
double rank of men was sweeping forward like the cutting arm of a
giant mower. The party of Americans joined the sparse crowd of
spectators at the edge of the field, the better to see. Jane Gerson
found herself chatting with Willy Kimball and Kitty Sherman a
little apart from the others. A light touch fell on her elbow. She
turned to find Aimer, the hotel keeper, smiling deferentially.

"Pardon—a thousand pardons for the intrusion, lady. I am
Aimer, of the Hotel Splendide."

"Oh, no, lady!" Aimer spread out his hands. "I happened to see
you here watching the parade, and I remembered a trivial duty I
have which, if I may be so bold as to ask, you may discharge much
more quickly than I—if you will."

"I discharge a duty—for you?" The girl did not conceal her
puzzlement. Aimer's hand fumbled in a pocket of his flapping alpaca
coat and produced a plain silver cigarette case, unmonogrammed. She
looked at it wonderingly.

"Captain Woodhouse—you met him at my hotel last night,
lady. He left this lying on his dresser when he quit his room to go
to barracks to-day. For me it is difficult to send a messenger with
it to the barracks—war time, lady—many restrictions
inside the lines. I came here hoping perhaps to see the captain
after the parade. But you—"

"You wish me to give this to Captain Woodhouse?" Jane finished,
a flicker of annoyance crossing her face. "Why me?"

"You are at Government House, lady. Captain Woodhouse comes to
tea—all newcomers to the garrison do that. If you would be so
good—"

Jane took the cigarette case from Aimer's outstretched hand.
Lady Crandall had told her the captain would be in for tea that
afternoon. It was a small matter, this accommodation, as long as
Aimer did not insinuate—as he had not done—any
impertinence; imply any over eagerness on her part to perform so
minor a service for the officer. Ahner bowed his thanks and lost
himself in the crowd. Jane turned again to where Kitty and Kimball
were chatting.

"A dun for extra service the landlord forgot last night, I'll
wager," the youth greeted her.

"Oh, no, just a little present," Jane laughed back at him,
holding up the silver case. "With Aimer's compliments to Captain
Woodhouse, who forgot it when he gave up his room to-day. I've
promised to turn it over to the captain and save the hotel man a
lot of trouble and red tape getting a messenger through to the
captain's quarters."

"By Jove!" Kimball's tired eyes lighted up with a quick flash of
smoker's yearning. "A life-saver! Came away from my room without my
pet Egyptians—Mr. Sherman yelling at me to hurry or we'd miss
this slow show and all that. I'm going to play the panhandler and
beg one of your captain friend's smokes. He must be a good sort or
you wouldn't be doing little favors for him, Miss Gerson. Come,
now; in your capacity as temporary executrix will you invest one of
the captain's cigarettes in a demand of real charity?"

Keen desire was scarcely veiled under Kimball's fiction of light
patter. Smilingly the girl extended the case to him.

"Just to make it businesslike, the executrix demands your note
for—um—sixty days, say. Tor one cigarette received, I
promise to pay '—"

"Given!" He pulled a gold pencil from his pocket and made a
pretense of writing the form on his cuff. Then he lit his borrowed
cigarette and inhaled it gratefully.

"Your captain friend's straight from Egypt; I don't have to be
told that," Willy Kimball murmured, in polite ecstasy. "At
Shepard's, in Cairo, you'll get such a cigarette as this, and
nowhere else in a barren world. The breath of the acanthus
blossom—if it really has a breath—never heard."

"Back in Kewanee the Ladies' Aid Society will have you
arrested," Kitty put in mischievously. "They're terribly wrought up
over cigarettes—for minors."

Kimball cast her a glance of deep reproach.

As he lifted the cigarette to his lips for a second puff, Jane's
eyes mechanically followed the movement. Something caught and held
them, wonder-filled.

On the side of the white paper cylinder nearest her a curious
brown streak appeared—by the merest freak of chance her
glance fell on it. As she looked, the thin stain grew darker
nearest the fresh ash. The farther end of the faint tracing
moved—yes, moved, like a threadworm groping its way along a
stick.

"Now what are they all doing out there?" Kitty Sherman was
asking. "All those men running top speed with their guns carried up
so high."

Jane Gerson was watching the twisting and writhing of that
filament of brown against the white. An invisible hand was writing
in brown ink on the side of the cigarette—writing backward
and away from the burning tip. It lengthened by seconds—"and
Louisa to Crandall."

So the letters of silver nitrate formed themselves under her
eyes. Kimball took the cigarette from his lips and held it by his
side for a minute. He and Kitty were busy with each other's company
for the time, ignoring Jane. She burned with curiosity and with
excitement mounting like the fire of wine to her brain. Would he
never put that cigarette to his lips again, so she could follow the
invisible pen! So fleeting, so evanescent that worm track on the
paper, wrought by fire and by fire to be consumed. A mystery
vanishing even as it was aborning! After ages, the unconscious
Kimball set the cigarette again in his lips.

"—informer has denounced you and Louisa-t–play your
game and he will be slow to—"

Again the cigarette came away in Kimball's hand. Acting on
impulse she did not stop to question, Jane struck it from the young
man's outstretched hand and set her foot on it as it fell in the
dust.

"Oh, I'm clumsy!" She fell lightly against Kimball's shoulder
and caught herself in well-simulated confusion. "Standing tiptoe to
see what that man on a horse is going to do—lost my balance.
And—and your precious cigarette—gone..."

The anguish in Jane Gerson's voice was not play. It was
real—terribly real.

JANE GERSON, alone for the first time since the
incident of the cigarette on the parade ground a few hours back,
sat before a narrow window in her room at Government House,
fighting a great bewilderment. The window opened on a varied
prospect of blooming gardens and sail-flecked bay beyond. But for
her eyes the riot of color and clash of contrast between bald cliff
and massed green had no appeal. Her hands locked and unlocked
themselves on her lap. The girl's mind was struggling to coordinate
scattered circumstances into a comprehensible whole, to grapple
with the ethical problem of her own conduct.

What she knew, or thought she knew—and what she should
do—those were the two saber points of the dilemma upon which
she found herself impaled.

Could there now be any doubt of what she felt to be the truth?
First, she had met Captain Woodhouse on the Express du
Nord—an officer in the English army, by his own statement,
returning from leave in England to his post in Egypt. Then, the
encounter of last night at the Hotel Splendide, Captain Woodhouse
first denying his identity, then admitting it under the enforced
pledge that she should not reveal the former meeting. Captain
Woodhouse, not in Egypt, but at Gibraltar, and, as she had soon
learned, there with papers of transfer from an Egyptian post to the
garrison of the Rock. Following this surprise had come General
Crandall's dogged examination of that morning—his blunt
declaration that a serious question as to the captain's position at
Gibraltar had arisen, and his equally plain-spoken threat to have
the truth from her concerning her knowledge of the suspected
officer.

To cap all, the message on the cigarette! An informer—she
guessed the prefix to the unfinished word—had denounced "you
and Louisa" to General Crandall. To whom the pronoun referred was
unmistakable—Aimer's eagerness to insure Captain Woodhouse's
receiving the cigarette case plainly defined that. As to "Louisa,"
involved with Woodhouse, the girl from Hildebrand's was sensible
only of a passing flash of curiosity, made a bit more piquant,
perhaps, by a little dart of jealousy, hardly comprehended as such.
A hotel keeper warns an officer in the Gibraltar garrison that he
has been denounced, but in the same message adjures him to "play
your own game." That was the single compelling fact.

Jane Gerson flushed—in anger, or was it through
guilt?—when she found her lips framing the word "spy"!

Now she understood why General Crandall had put her on the
grill—why he, informed, had leaped to the significance of the
gift of roses and deduced her previous acquaintance with their
donor. Her host was not, after all, the possessor of magical powers
of mind reading. He was, instead, just the sober, conscientious
protector of the Rock on whom rested responsibility for the lives
of its defenders and the maintenance of England's flag there. His
duty was to catch—and shoot—spies.

Shoot spies! The girl's heart contracted at the thought. No, no!
She would not—she could not reveal to the governor the
knowledge she had. That would be to send death to a man as surely
as if hers was the finger at the trigger.

Jane Gerson was on her feet now, pacing the room. Over and over
again she told herself that this man who had come into her life,
obliquely enough, had no claim on her; had brought nothing to her
but distress. He had deceived her even, and then, when caught in
the deception, had wrested from her a promise that she would help
him continue further deception against others. Against her will he
had made her a party to some deep and audacious plot, whose purpose
she could not guess, but which must be but a part of the huge
mystery of war.

And soon this Captain Woodhouse was to come to his
trial—the purpose of his invitation to tea that afternoon
flashed clear as white light. Soon she would be in the same room
with him; would be forced to witness the spinning of the web set to
trap him. He would come unwarned, unsuspecting. He might leave that
room under guard and with guns at his back—guns soon to be
leveled at his heart. Yet she, Jane Gerson, possessed the power to
save him—as the warning of the cigarette surely would be
saving, once a clever man were put on his guard by it.

Would she speak—and betray General Crandall, her kindly
host? Would she lock her lips and see a man walk blindfolded to his
death?

A few minutes before five o'clock, Major Bishop was announced at
Government House and received by General Crandall in the library.
Before Jaimihr Khan, who had preceded the visitor through the
double doors from the hall, could retire, his master stopped
him.

The tall reedlike figure of the Indian glided to General
Crandall's side. His thin ascetic features were set in their usual
mold of unseeing detachment; only his dark eyes showed
animation.

"Yes, my General," he said, as he stopped before the
Englishman.

"I have a little commission for you, Jaimihr," General Crandall
began, weighing his words with care. "The utmost
discretion—you understand?"

"The utmost, I understand." Jaimihr Khan's lips moved ever so
slightly, and his eyes looked steadily ahead.

"In the course of a few minutes, Captain Woodhouse, of the
signal service, will be here to tea," the general began. The Indian
repeated mechanically: "Cap-tain Wood-house."

"As soon as you have ushered him into this room, you will go as
quickly as you can to the West Barracks. His room will be No. 36,
on the second gallery. You will enter his room with a key I shall
give you and search it from end to end—everything in it.
Anything that is of a suspicious nature—you understand,
Jaimihr, what that might be—you will bring here to me at
once."

"It shall be done, General Sahib."

"No one, officer or man, must suspect your errand. No one must
see you enter or leave that room."

"No one," the Indian repeated.

General Crandall went to a wall safe set by the side of the
double doors, turned the combination, and opened it. He took from a
drawer therein a bunch of keys, selected one, and passed it to
Jaimihr Khan.

"The utmost care, remember!" he warned again.

"Is it likely I should fail you this time, General Sahib, when
so many times I have succeeded?"

"Make the search complete." General Crandall ignored his
servant's question. "But return as quickly as you can. I shall keep
Captain Woodhouse here until you do so. You must report to me
before he leaves this house."

"When the moment arrives, your servant shall fly, General
Sahib," the Indian replied, and withdrew.

"I say, General, you have a great deal of faith in your Indian,"
Bishop ventured, accepting a cigarette from his superior's case.
"Rather a delicate commission you've given him."

"Absolute faith, yes. Been with me five years—picked him
up in Rangoon—have tried him many times, and found him loyal
as any officer in the service." General Crandall put in his words
enough emphasis to carry slight rebuke for the other's implied
criticism. But the pursy little major was too sure of the fine
terms of personal friendship between himself and his superior to
feel embarrassment.

"About that girl, General—that cigar girl, Josepha,
concerning whom your beach-comber friend sent that warning this
morning from the safe ground of Spain—"

"Obvious thing would have been to clap her in a cell," the
governor answered. "But I have not, for the very good reason that
if there's anything in this fellow's accusations against her, as
well as against Woodhouse, the game will be to keep her watched and
give our captain an opportunity to communicate with her. Minute he
does that—why, we've got our proof against both."

"Then I take it you've put a trailer on the girl?"

"At eight o'clock to-night I'll know where she's been every hour
of the day," the general returned confidently. "She can't leave the
town without being arrested. Now, as to our plan for Woodhouse's
reception—this affair of Craigen's wife; we might as well
agree on points, so that—" He heard his wife's voice in the
room off the library, and broke off abruptly. "Confound it; the
women are coming! Just step into my room with me, and we'll go over
this little matter, Major."

General Crandall held open a small door at the left of his desk
and followed Bishop through. Lady Crandall and Jane entered the
library almost at the same time.

"This tea of George's is preposterous," the lady of Government
House was grumbling. "Said we must have this man from Egypt here at
once."

"If you were English, no tea could be preposterous," Jane
countered, with a brave attempt at lightness. She felt each passing
moment a weight adding to the suspense of the inevitable event.

"Well, I'm going to get it through with just as soon as I can,"
Lady Crandall snapped. Then Jaimihr Khan threw open the double
doors and announced: "Cap-tain Wood-house, my lady!"

"Show him up!" she commanded; then in complaint to Jane: "Now
where do you suppose that husband of mine went? Just like him to
suggest a tea and forget to make an appearance."

Captain Woodhouse appeared between the opened doors in khaki and
trim puttees. He stood very straight for an instant, his eyes
shooting rapidly about the room. Lady Crandall hurried forward to
greet him, and his momentary stiffness disappeared. The girl behind
her followed slowly, almost reluctantly. Woodhouse grasped her
extended hand.

"It was good of you to send the flowers," she murmured. The man
smiled appreciation.

"Do you know," he said, "after I sent them I thought you'd
consider me a bit—prompt."

"I am learning something every day—about Englishmen," Jane
managed to answer, with a ghost of a smile.

"Always something good, I hope," Woodhouse was quick to retort,
his eyes eagerly trying to fathom the cause of the girl's
restraint.

Lady Crandall, who had been vainly ringing for Jaimihr Khan,
excused herself on the necessity of looking after the tea things.
Jane experienced a quick stab of dread at finding herself alone
with this man. Unexpected opportunity was urging a decision which
an hour of solitude in her room had failed to bring. Yet she
trembled, appalled and afraid to speak, before the very magnitude
of the moment's exigency. "A spy—a spy!" whispered austere
duty. "He will die!" her heart cried in protest.

"Miss Gerson, it's good to see you again and know by your
handclasp you have forgiven me for—for what was very
necessary at the moment—last night—our meeting in the
Splendide." Captain Woodhouse was standing before her now, his
grave eyes looking down into hers. The girl caught a deep note of
sincerity and something else—something vibrantly personal.
Yet her tongue would not be loosed of its burden.

"A very pretty speech," she answered, with attempted raillery.
"I shall think of it on the boat going home."

"I say, I wish you weren't always in that horrid state of
mind—on your way home mentally," Captain Woodhouse
challenged.

"I shall be so in reality day after to-morrow, I hope," she
replied. "Away from all this bewildering war and back in
comfortable little New York." The man seemed genuinely grieved at
her announcement.

"New York must be worth while; but I imagine you have nothing
picturesque—nothing old there. I'll wager you haven't a
single converted monastery like Government House in all your
city."

"Not many things in New York have been converted," she answered,
with a smile. "Our greatest need is for a municipal
evangelist."

False—all false, this banter! She knew it to be, and so
she believed he must read it. And the man—his ease of manner
was either that of innocence or of supreme nerve, the second not
less to be admired than the first. Could it be that behind his
serious eyes, now frankly telling her what she dared not let
herself read in them, lay duplicity and a spy's cunning?

"I fancy you New Yorkers suffer most from newness—newness
right out of the shop," she heard him saying. "But the old things
are the best. Imagine the monks of a long-ago yesterday toasting
themselves before this ancient fireplace." He waved toward the
massive Gothic mantel bridging a cavernous fireplace. An old chime
bell, green with weathering, hung on a low frame beside the
firedogs.

"You're mistaken; that's manufactured antiquity," Jane caught
him up. "Lady Crandall told me last night that fireplace is just
five years old. One of the preceding governor's hobbies, it
was."

Woodhouse caught at her answer with a quick lifting of the
brows. He turned again to feast his eyes on the girl's piquant
face, even more alluring now because of the fleeting color that
left the cheeks with a tea rose's coldness.

"Miss Gerson, something I have done or said"—the man was
laboring after words—"you are not yourself, and maybe I am
respon—"

She turned from him with a slight shudder. Her hand was extended
in mute appeal for silence. He waited while his eyes followed the
heaving of her shoulders under the emotion that was racking her.
Suddenly she faced him again, and words rushed from her lips in an
abandon of terror:

"Captain Woodhouse, I know too much—about you and why you
are here. Oh, more than I want to! Accident—bad luck, believe
me, it is not my seeking that I know you are a-a—"

He had started forward at her outburst, and now he stood very
close to her, his gray eyes cold and unchanging.

"Say it—say the word! I'm not afraid to hear it," he
commanded tensely. She drew back from him a little wildly, her
hands fluttering up as if to fend him off.

"You—you are in great danger this minute. You were brought
here this afternoon to be trapped—exposed and
made—"

"I was fully aware of that when I came. Miss Gerson," he
interrupted. "The invitation, coming so suddenly—so
pressing—I think I read it aright."

"But the promise you made me give last night!" Sudden resentment
brushed aside for the instant the girl's first flood of sympathy.
"That has involved me with you. Oh, that was unfair—to make
me promise I would not allude to—to our first meeting!"

"Involved you?" He closed one of her hands in his as if to calm
her and force more rational speech. "Then you have been—"

"Questioned by General Crandall—about you," she broke in,
struggling slightly to free her hand. "Questioned—and even
bullied and threatened."

"And you kept your promise?" The question was put so low Jane
could hardly catch it. She slowly nodded.

"Miss Gerson, you will never have cause to regret that you did."
Woodhouse pressed her hand with almost fierce intenseness, then let
it go. Her face was flaming now under the stress of excitement. She
knew tears stood in her eyes, and was angered at their being there;
he might mistake them. Woodhouse continued, in the same suppressed
tone:

"You were on the point of using a word a minute ago. Miss
Gerson, which was hard for you to voice because you thought it an
ugly word. You seemed sure it was the right word to fit me. You
only hesitated out of—ah—decency. Yet you kept faith
with me before General Crandall. May I hope that means—"

"You may hope nothing!" Quick rebellion at what she divined to
be coming flamed in Jane's eyes. "You have no right to hope for
more from me than what you forced by promise. I would not be saying
what I have to you if—if I did not feel I—that your
life—"

"You misunderstood," he broke in stiffly. "I was on the point of
saying I hoped you would not always believe me a—"

"Not believe!" Her hand went to the broad ribbon belt she wore
and brought out the silver cigarette case. This she passed to him
with a swift gesture.

"Aimer, the Hotel Splendide man, gave me this to-day at parade,
urging that I deliver it to you." She was speaking hurriedly. "By a
miracle—the strangest circumstance in the world—I
learned the message this cigarette case was to carry to you. Oh,
no, innocently enough on my part—it came by a chance I must
not take the time to explain."

"A message from—Aimer to me?" Woodhouse could not conceal
the start her words gave him. He took a step toward her
eagerly.

"Yes, a message. You must have it to protect yourself. The
message was this:

"Informer has denounced you and Louisa to—"

Her voice died in her throat. Over Captain Woodhouse's shoulder
she saw a door open. General Crandall and a short fat man in
officer's uniform entered the library.

Jane acknowledged the introduction. Major Bishop advanced to the
meeting with Woodhouse expectantly. With an air of ill-assumed
ease, the governor made them known to each other.

"Major Bishop, your new man in the signal tower, Captain
Woodhouse, from Wady Haifa. Captain, do you happen to remember the
major? Was a captain when you were here on the Rock—captain
in the engineers."

"I'm afraid we never met," Woodhouse began easily. "I was here
such a short time. Expected to meet Major Bishop when I reported at
his office this morning, but he was over at the wireless station,
his aid told me."

"Right, Captain!" Bishop chirped, shaking his subordinate's
hand. "I—ah—imagine this is the first time we've met."
He put the least shade of emphasis on the verb.

Woodhouse met his eyes boldly. Lady Crandall, bustling in at
this minute, directed a maid where to wheel the tea wagon, while
Jane went to assist her with the pouring. The men soon had their
cups, and the general and major contrived to group themselves with
Woodhouse sitting between them. Sir George, affecting a gruff
geniality, launched a question:

"Rock look familiar to you, Captain?"

"After a fashion, yes," Woodhouse answered slowly. "Though three
months is so short a time for one to get a lasting impression."

"Nonsense!" the general reproved gustily. "Some places you see
once you never forget. This old Rock is one of them; eh,
Bishop?"

"I don't know," the chunky little officer replied. "The powers
back home never give me a chance to get away and forget." There was
a pause as the men sipped their tea. Woodhouse broke the
silence:

"Man can be stationed in worse places than Gibraltar."

"If you mean Egypt, I agree with you," Crandall assented. "There
six years."

"Were you, General? What station?" Woodhouse was coolly stirring
his tea, emphatically at his ease. Jane, her back to the men as she
fussed over the tea wagon, filled her own cup with hot water
inadvertently. She tried to laugh over the mistake, but her fingers
trembled as she poured the water back into the kettle.

"Not on the lazy old Nile, as you were—lucky dog!" the
general returned. "Out on the yellow sands—at Arkowan—a
place in the sun, never fear!"

The women had their cups now, and joined the men, sitting a
little behind. Jane caught a shrewd sidewise glance from the
general—a glance that sought a quick and sure reading of her
emotions. She poised her cup as if expecting a question and the
glance turned aside. But it had warned the girl that she was not
altogether a passive factor in the situation. She set a guard over
her features.

"Let me see, Captain Woodhouse"—it was little Bishop who
took up the probe—"you must have been here in the days when
Craigen was governor—saw your papers have it that you were
here three months in nineteen seven."

Woodhouse smiled—secret disdain for the clumsy trap was in
that smile.

"I'm afraid I do not," he said. "Craigen was considered a small,
almost a delicate, man." He had recognized the bungling emphasis
laid by Bishop on the Craigen characteristics, and his answer was
pretty safely drawn by choosing the opposites. Bishop looked
flustered for an instant, then admitted Woodhouse was right. He had
confused Sir David Craigen with his predecessor, he said in
excuse.

"I fancy I ought to remember the man. I had tea in this very
room with him several times," Woodhouse ventured. He let his eyes
rove as if in reminiscence. "Much the same
here—as—except, General Crandall, I don't recall that
fireplace." He indicated the heavy Gothic ornament on the opposite
side of the room.

Jane caught her breath under the surge of secret elation. The
resource of the man so to turn to advantage a fact that she had
carelessly given him in their conversation of a few moments back!
The girl saw a flicker of surprise cross General Crandall's face.
Lady Crandall broke in:

"You have a good memory, after all, Captain Woodhouse. That
fireplace is just five years old."

"Um—yes, yes," her husband admitted. "Clever piece of
work, though. Likely to deceive anybody by its show of
antiquity."

General Crandall called for a second slice of lemon in his cup.
He was obviously sparring for another opening, but was impressed by
the showing the suspected man was making. Bishop pushed the
inquisition another step:

"Did you happen to be present, Captain, at the farewell dinner
we gave little Billy Barnes? I think it must have been in the
spring you were here."

"There were many dinners, Major Bishop." Woodhouse was carefully
selecting his words, and he broke his sentences with a sip from his
cup. "Seven years is a long time, you know.

We had much else to think about in Egypt than old dinners
elsewhere."

Bishop appeared struck by an inspiration. He clapped his cup
into its saucer with a sudden bang.

"Hang it, man, you must have been here in the days of Lady
Evelyn. Remember her, don't you?"

"Would I be likely to forget?" the captain parried. Out of the
tail of his eye he had a flash of Jane Gerson's white face, of her
eyes seeking his with a palpitant, hunted look. The message of her
eyes brought to him an instant of grace in sore trial.

"Seven years of Egypt—or of a hotter place—couldn't
make a man forget her!" The major was rattling on for the benefit
of those who had not come under the spell of the charmer. "Sir
David Craigen's wife, and as lovely a woman as ever came out from
England. Every man on the Rock lost his heart that spring.
Woodhouse, even in three months' time you must have fallen like the
rest of us."

"I'd rather not incriminate myself." Woodhouse smiled sagely as
he passed his cup to Lady Crandall to be refilled.

"Don't blame you," Bishop caught him up. "A most outrageous
flirt, and there was the devil to pay. Broken hearts were as thick
on the Rock that year as strawberries in May, including poor
Craigen's. And after one young subaltern tried to kill
himself—you'll remember that, Woodhouse—Sir David
packed the fair charmer off to England. Then he simply ate his
heart out and—died."

General Crandall rose to set his cup on the tea wagon. With the
most casual air in the world, he addressed himself to
Woodhouse:

"When Sir David died, many of his effects were left in this
house to await their proper owner's disposition, and Lady Craigen
has been—er—delicate about claiming them. Among them
was the portrait of Lady Craigen herself which still hangs in this
room. Have you recognized it, Captain?"

Woodhouse, whose mind had been leaping forward, vainly trying to
divine the object of the Lady Evelyn lead, now knew, and the
knowledge left him beyond his resources. He recognized the moment
of his unmasking. But the man's nerve was steady, even in
extremity. He rose and turned to face the rear wall of the library,
against the tapestry of which hung four oil portraits in their deep
old frames of heavy gold. Three of these were of women. A fourth,
also the likeness of a woman, hung over the fireplace. Chances were
four to one against blind choice.

As Woodhouse slowly lifted his eyes to the line of portraits, he
noticed that Jane had moved to place the broad tent shade of a
floor lamp on its tall standard of mahogany between herself and the
other two men so that her face was momentarily screened from them.
She looked quickly at the portrait over the mantel and away again.
Woodhouse, knowing himself the object of two pairs of hostile eyes,
made his survey deliberately, with purpose increasing the tension
of the moment. His eyes ranged the line of portraits on the rear
wall, then turned to that one over the fireplace.

"Ah, yes, a rather good likeness, eh. Major?" He drawled his
identification with a disinterested air.

Crandall's manner underwent instant change. His former slightly
strained punctiliousness gave way to naturalness and easy spirits.
One would have said he was advocate for a man on trial, for whom
the jury had just pronounced, "Not proven." Scotch verdict, yes,
but one acceptable enough to the governor of Gibraltar. The desk
telephone sounded just then, and General Crandall answered. After
listening briefly, he gave the orders, "Dress flags!" and hung up
the receiver.

"Fleet's just entering the harbor,' signal tower reports," he
explained to the others. "Miss Gerson, if you care to step here to
the window you'll see something quite worth while."

Jane, light-hearted almost to the point of mild hysteria at the
noticeable relaxation of strain denoting danger passed, bounded to
a double French window giving on a balcony and commanding a view of
all the bay to the Spanish shore. She exclaimed, in awe:

"Ships—ships! Hundreds of them! Why, General,
what—"

"The Mediterranean fleet, young woman, bound home to protect the
Channel against the German high-seas fleet." Deep pride was in the
governor's voice. His eyes kindled as they fell on the distant
pillars of smoke—scores of them mounting straight up to
support the blue on their blended arches. Captain Woodhouse could
scarcely conceal the start General Crandall's announcement gave
him. He followed the others to the window more slowly.

"Wirelessed they'd be in ten hours ago," the governor explained
to his wife. "Rear-admiral won't make his official call until
morning, however. In these times he sticks by his flagship after
five o'clock."

"Wonderful—wonderful!" Bishop turned in unfeigned
enthusiasm to Woodhouse, behind him. "There is the power—and
the pride—of England. Sort of thrills a chap, eh?"

"Rather!" Woodhouse replied.

"Well, must get down to the quay to receive any despatches that
may come ashore," the major exclaimed. "Gad, but it gives me a
little homesick tug at the heart to see these grim old dogs of war.
They represent that tight little island that rules the waves."

"Ah, London—London—the big, old town where they pull
the strings that make us dance!" General Crandall, leaning against
the window frame, his eyes on the incoming fleet, voiced the
chronic nostalgia of the man in the service.

"The town for me!" Woodhouse exclaimed with fervor. "I'm sick
for the sight of her—the sounds of her—the smells of
her: the orange peel and the asphalt and the gas coming in over
Vauxhall Bridge."

Bishop turned on him admiringly.

"By George, that does hit it off, old man—no mistake!"

Jane was out on the balcony now with field glasses she had
picked up from the governor's desk. She called back through the
curtains, summoning Woodhouse to come and pick out for her the
flagship. When he had joined her. Bishop stepped quickly to his
superior's side.

"What do you think, General? By George, it seems to me it would
need an Englishman to give one that sniff of London this chap just
got off."

"Exactly," the general caught him up crisply. "And an
Englishman's done it—Rudyard Kipling. Any German who can read
English can read Kipling."

"But what do you think, General? Chap strikes me as
genuine—that portrait of Lady Evelyn clenched things, I take
it."

"Confound it! We haven't absolutely proved anything, pro or
con," General Crandall grumbled, in perplexity. "Thing'll have to
be decided by the Indian—what he finds, or doesn't
find—in Woodhouse's room. Let you know soon as I hear."

Bishop hurried to make his adieux to Lady Crandall and her
guest, and was starting for the doors when Woodhouse, stepping in
from the balcony, offered to join him. The governor stopped
him.

"By the way, Captain, if you'll wait for me a minute I should
like your company down the Rock."

Bishop had gone, and the general, taking Woodhouse's agreement
for granted, also left the room.

Woodhouse, suddenly thrown back on his guard, could find nothing
to do but assent. But when Lady Crandall excused herself on the
score of having to dress for dinner, he welcomed compensation in
being alone with the girl who had gone with him steadfastly,
unflinchingly through moments of trial. She stood before the
curtains screening the balcony, hesitant, apparently meditating
flight. To her Woodhouse went, in his eyes an appeal for a moment
alone which would not be denied.

"You were—very kind to me," he began, his voice very low
and broken. "If it had not been—for your help, I would
have—"

"I could not see you—see you grope blindly—and
fail." She turned her head to look back through the opened glass
doors to the swiftly moving dots in the distance that represented
the incoming battle fleet.

"But was there no other reason except just humanity to prompt
you?" He had possessed himself of one of her hands now, and his
eyes compelled her to turn her own to meet their gaze. "Once when
they—were trying to trip me, I caught a look from your eyes,
and—and it was more than—than pity."

"You are presuming too much," the girl parried faintly; but
Woodhouse would not be rebuffed.

"You must hear me," he rushed on impetuously. "This is a strange
time for me to say this, but you say you are going—going away
soon. I may not have another opportunity—hear me! I am
terribly in earnest when I tell you I love you—love you
beyond all believing. No, no! Not for what you have done for me,
but for what you are to me—beloved."

She quickly pulled her hand free from his grasp and tried to
move to the door. He blocked her way.

"I can not have you go without a word from you," he pleaded.
"Just a word to tell me I may—"

"How can you expect—that—I—knowing what I
do—" She was stumbling blindly, but persisted: "You, who have
deceived others, are deceiving them now—how can I know you
are not deceiving me, too?"

"I can not explain." He dropped his head hopelessly, and his
voice seemed lifeless. "It is a time of war. You must accept my
word that I am honest—with you."

She slowly shook her head and started again for the double
doors. "Perhaps—when you prove that to me ." He took an eager
step toward her. "But, no, you can not. I will be sailing so soon,
and—and you must forget."

"You ask the impossible!" Woodhouse quickly seized her hand and
raised it to his lips. As he did so, the double doors opened
noiselessly and Jaimihr Khan stood between them, sphinx-like.

Jane, startled, withdrew her hand, and without a farewell
glance, ran across the library and through the door to Lady
Crandall's room. Jaimihr Khan, with a cold glance at Woodhouse,
moved silently to the door of General Crandall's room and
knocked.

"It is I—Jaimihr Khan," he answered to the muffled hail
from within. "Yes, General Sahib, I will wait."

He turned and looked toward Woodhouse. The latter had taken a
cigarette from the case Aimer had sent him through Jane, and was
turning it over in his hand curiously. The Indian, treading like a
hunting cat, began lighting candles. His tour of the room brought
him to the captain's side, and there he stood, motionless, until
Woodhouse, with a start, observed him.

"Cap-tain Wood-house has been most in-discreet," he said, in his
curious mechanical way of speech.

Woodhouse turned on him angrily.

"What do you mean?" he snapped.

"Is it that they have ceased to teach discretion—at the
Wilhelmstrasse?" The Indian's face was a mask.

"I know nothing about the Wilhelmstrasse," the white man
answered, in a voice suddenly strained.

"Then it is veree, veree foolish for the captain to leave in his
room these plans." Jaimihr Khan took from his girdle a thin roll of
blue prints—the plans of the signal tower and Room D which
Aimer had given Woodhouse the night before. He held them gingerly
between slender thumb and forefinger.

Woodhouse recoiled.

"The general sahib has sent me to search the cap-tain's room,"
the even voice of Jaimihr Khan ran on. "Behold the results of my
journey!"

Woodhouse sent a lightning glance at the door leading to the
governor's room, then stepped lightly away from the Indian and
regarded him with hard calculating eyes.

"What do you propose to do—with those plans?"

"What should I do?" The white shoulders of the Indian went up in
a shrug. "They will stand you before a wall, Cap-tain Wood-house.
And fire. It is the price of in-discretion at a time like
this."

Woodhouse's right hand whipped back to his holster, which hung
from his sword belt, and came forward again with a thick,
short-barreled weapon in it.

The door to General Crandall's room opened, and the general, in
uniform evening dress, stepped into the library. Woodhouse swiftly
slipped his revolver behind his back, though keeping it ready for
instant use.

The latter smilingly declined, his eyes all the while on the
Indian, who stood by the corner of the general's desk. Between the
sleek brown hands a tiny blue roll of paper was twisting into a
narrower wisp under the careless manipulation of thin fingers.

"Well, Jaimihr," Crandall briskly addressed the servant, "have
you completed the errand I sent you on?"

"Yes, General Sahib." The brown fingers still caressed the plans
of the signal tower.

"Have you anything to report?" The general had his cigarette in
his mouth and was pawing his desk for a match. Jaimihr Khan slowly
lifted the tip of the paper wisp in his fingers to the flame of a
candle on the end of the desk, then held the burning tip to his
master's cigarette.

"Nothing, General Sahib."

"Very good. Come, Woodhouse; sorry to have kept you waiting."
The general started for the double doors. Woodhouse followed. He
passed very close to the Indian, but the latter made no sign. His
eyes were on the burning wisp of paper between his fingers.

THE next day, Thursday, was one of hectic
excitement for Gibraltar. Focus of the concentrated attention of
town and Rock was the battle fleet, clogging all the inner harbor
with its great gray hulks. Super-dreadnaughts, like the standing
walls of a submerged Atlantis, lay close to the quays, barges
lashed alongside the folded booms of their torpedo nets. Behind
them, battle cruisers and scouts formed a protecting cordon. Far
out across the entrance to the harbor, the darting black shapes of
destroyers on constant guard were shuttles trailing their threads
of smoke through the blue web of sea and sky. Between fleet and
shore snorting cockleshells of launches established lanes of
communication; khaki of the Bock's defenders and blue of the
fleet's officers met, passed, and repassed. In wardroom and club
lounge glasses were touched in pledges to the united service. The
high commander of the Mediterranean fleet paid his official visit
to the governor of Gibraltar, and the governor, in turn, was
received with honors upon the quarterdeck of the flagship. But
under the superficial courtesies of fanfare and present arms the
stern business of coaling fleet progressed at high tension. It was
necessary that all of the fighting machines have their bunkers
filled by noon of the following day. Every minute that the Channel
up under the murky North Sea fogs lay without full strength of her
fleet protection was added danger for England.

That morning, Captain Woodhouse went on duty in the signal
tower. Major Bishop, his superior, had summoned him to his office
immediately after breakfast and assigned him to his tasks there.
Sufficient proof, Woodhouse assured himself, with elation, that he
had come through the fire in General Crandall's library, tested and
found genuine. Through this pretext and that, he had been kept off
duty the day before, denied access to the slender stone tower high
up on the Rock's crest which was the motor center of Gibraltar's
ganglia of defense.

The small office in which Woodhouse was installed was situated
at the very top of the tower—a room glassed on four sides
like the lantern room of a lighthouse, and provided with telescope,
a telephone switchboard, range finders, and all the complicated
machinery of gunfire control. On one side were trestle boards
supporting charts of the ranges—figured areas representing
every square yard of water from the nearer harbor below out to the
farthest reaching distance of the monster disappearing guns. A
second graphic sheet showed the harbor and anchorages and the
entrance to the straits; this map was thickly spotted with little,
red, numbered dots—the mines. Sown like a turnip field with
these deadly capsules of destruction were all the waters
thereabouts; their delicate tendrils led under water and through
conduits in the Rock up to this slender spire called the signal
tower. As he climbed the winding stairway to his newly assigned
post, Woodhouse had seen painted on a small wooden door just below
the room he was to occupy the single white letter "D."

Room D—where the switches were, where a single sweep of
the hand could loose all the hidden death out there in the crowded
harbor—it lay directly below his feet.

Captain Woodhouse's duties were not arduous. He had as single
companion a sergeant of the signal service, whose post was at the
window overlooking the harbor. The sergeant read the semaphore
message from the slender signal arm on the flagship's
bridge—directions for the coal barges' movements,
businesslike orders to be transmitted to the quartermaster in
charge of the naval stores ashore, and such humdrum of routine.
These Woodhouse recorded and forwarded to their various
destinations over the telephone.

He had much time for thought—and much to think about.

Yesterday's scene in the library of Government House—his
grilling by the two suspicious men, when a false answer on his part
would have been the first step toward a firing squad. Yes, and what
had followed between himself and the little American—the girl
who had protected and aided him—ah, the pain of that trial
was hardly less poignant than had been the terror of the one
preceding it. She had asked him to prove to her that he was not
what she thought him. Before another day was past she would be out
of his life and would depart, believing—yes,
convinced—that the task he had set himself to do was a
dishonorable one. She could not know that the soldiers of the
Hidden Army have claim to heroism no less than they who join battle
under the sun. But he was to see Jane Gerson once more; Woodhouse
caught at this circumstance as something precious. To-night at
Government House Lady Crandall's dinner to the refugee Americans on
the eve of their departure would offer a last opportunity. How
could he turn it to the desire of his heart?

One more incident of a crowded yesterday gave Woodhouse a crust
for rumination—the unmasking Jaimihr Khan, the Indian, had
elected for himself at that critical minute when it lay in his
power to betray the stranger in the garrison. The captain reviewed
the incident with great satisfaction—how of a sudden the wily
Indian had changed from an enemy holding a man's life in his hand
to that "friend in Government House," of whose existence the
cautious Aimer had hinted but whose identity he had kept concealed.
Aimer had said that this "friend" could lay his hand on the
combination to Room D in the signal tower when the proper moment
arrived. Now that he knew Jaimihr Khan in his true stripe,
Woodhouse made no doubt of his ability to fulfill Aimer's
prophecy.

And the proper moment would be this night! To-night, on the eve
of the great fleet's sailing, what Woodhouse had come to Gibraltar
to do must be accomplished or not at all.

The man's nerves were taut, and he rose to step to the bayward
window, there to look down on the embattled splendor of England's
defense. Steel forts ranged all in rows, awaiting but the
opportunity to loose their lightnings of obliteration against the
ships of an enemy. Cardboard ships! Shadows of dreams! In Room D,
just below his feet, a hand on the switches—a downward push,
and then Lady Crandall's dinner in Government House was in full
tide of hilarity. Under the heavy groined ceiling the spread table
with its napery and silver was the one spot of light in the long
shadowed dining-room. Round it sat the refugees—folk who had
eaten black bread and sausage and called that a meal—who had
dodged and twisted under the careless scourge of a war beyond their
understanding and sympathies, ridden in springless carts, been
bullied and hectored by military martinets and beggared by panicky
banks. Now, with the first glimpse of freedom already in sight and
under the warming influence of an American hostess' real American
meal, they were swept off their feet by high spirits almost
childlike. Henry J. Sherman, Kewanee's vagrant son returning from
painful pilgrimage, sat at the right of Lady Crandall; his pink
face was glowing with humor. To Consul Reynolds, who swore he would
have to pay for thus neglecting his consulate for so much as two
hours, had fallen the honor of escorting Mrs. Sherman to table.
Willy Kimball, polished as to shirt bosom and sleek hair, had eyes
and ears for none but the blithe Kitty. Next to General Crandall
sat Jane Gerson, radiant in a dinner gown of tricky gauze overlaid
on silk. At her right was Captain Woodhouse, in proper uniform
dinner coat faced with red and gold. Of the whole company,
Woodhouse alone appeared constrained. The girl by his side had been
cool in her greeting that evening; to his conversational sallies
she had answered with indifference, and now at table she divided
her favors between General Crandall and the perky little consul
across the table. It seemed to Woodhouse that she purposely added a
lash of cruelty to her joy at the approaching departure on the
morrow.

"Oh, you must all listen to this!" Kitty Sherman commanded the
attention of the table, with a clapping of hands. "Go ahead, Will;
he had the funniest accident—tell them about it."

Young Kimball looked conscious and began to stammer.

"You're getting us all excited, Willy," Henry J. boomed from the
opposite side of the table. "What happened?"

"Why—ah—really quite ridiculous, you know. Hardly a
matter to—ah—talk about." Willy fumbled the rose in the
lapel of his jacket and searched for words. "You see, this morning
I was thinking very hard about what I would do when I got back to
Kewanee—oh, quite enthusiastic I am about the little town,
now—and I—well, I mean to say, I got into my bath with
my wrist watch on."

Shouts of laughter added to the youth's confusion. Sherman
leaned far across the table and advised him in a hoarse
whisper:

Henry J. beamed expansively, pulled away his napkin, and proudly
lifted from each waistcoat pocket a ponderous watch, linked by the
thick chain passing through a buttonhole.

"This one"—he raised the right-hand timepiece—"tells
the time of the place I happen to be in—changed it so often I
guess the works'll never be the same again. But this one is my pet.
Here's Kewanee time—not touched since we pulled out of the C,
B. & Q. station on the twentieth of last May." He turned the
face around for the others to read. "Just three in the afternoon
there now. Old Ed Porter's got the Daily Enterprise out on the
street, and he's tilted back in his office chair, readin' the
Chicago Tribune that's just got in on the two-five train. The boys
at the bank are goin' out to the country club for golf—young
Pete Andrews wearin' the knickerbockers his wife cut down from his
old overcoat; sort of a horse-blanket pattern, you might say. The
town's just dozin' in the afternoon sun and—and not givin' a
hang whether Henry J. Sherman and family gets back or not."

"You're an old dear!" Lady Crandall bubbled. "Some day Kewanee
will erect a statue to you."

The talk turned to art, and the man from Kewanee even had the
stolid general wiping the tears from his eyes by his description
and criticism of some of the masters his wife had trotted him
around to admire.

"Willy, you'll be interested to know we got a painter in Kewanee
now," Henry J. cried. " 'Member young Frank Coales—old Henry
Coales' son? Well, he turned out to be an artist. Too bad, too; his
folks was fine people. But Frank was awfully headstrong about art.
Painted a war picture about as big as that wall there. Couldn't
find a buyer right away, so he turned it over to Tim Burns, who
keeps the saloon on Main Street. Been busy ever since, sorta taking
it out in trade, you might say."

Table talk was running at a gay rate when Mrs. Sherman, who had
sent frequent searching glances at Captain Woodhouse over the
nodding buds of the flower piece in the center of the board,
suddenly broke out:

"Ah, Captain Woodhouse, now I remember where I've seen you
before! I thought your face was familiar the minute I set my eyes
on you this evening."

Jaimihr Khan, who stood behind the general's chair, arms folded
and motionless, swiftly lifted one hand to his lips, but
immediately mastered himself again. General Crandall looked up with
a sharp crinkle of interest between his eyes. Captain Woodhouse,
unperturbed, turned to the Kewanee dowager.

"You have seen me before, Mrs. Sherman?"

"I am sure of it," the lady announced, with decision. The other
diners were listening now.

"Indeed! And where?" Woodhouse was smiling polite attention.

"Why, at the Winter Garden, in Berlin—a month ago!" Mrs.
Sherman was hugely satisfied with her identification. She appealed
to her husband for confirmation. "Remember, father, that gentleman
I mistook for Albert Downs, back home, that night we saw
that—er—wicked performance?"

"Can't say I do," Sherman answered tolerantly.

Woodhouse, still smiling, addressed Mrs. Sherman:

"Frightfully sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Sherman, but I was
not in Berlin a month ago. I came here from Egypt, where I had been
several years." Woodhouse heard Jane at his elbow catch her
breath.

"See, mother, there you go on your old hobby of recognizin'
folks," Sherman chided. Then, to the others: "Why, she's seen all
Kewanee since she came here to Europe. Even got a glimpse of the
Methodist minister at Monte Carlo."

"I have never been in Berlin in my life, Mrs. Sherman,"
Woodhouse was adding. "So, of course—"

"Well, I suppose I am wrong," the lady admitted. "But still I
could swear."

The governor, who had kept a cold eye on his subordinate during
this colloquy, now caught Woodhouse's glance. The captain smiled
frankly.

"Another such unexpected identification, General, and you'll
have me in the cells as a spy, I dare say," he remarked.

"Quite likely," Crandall answered shortly, and took up his fork
again. A maid stepped to Lady Crandall's chair at this juncture and
whispered something. The latter spoke to Woodhouse:

"You're wanted on the telephone in the library, Captain. Very
important, so the importunate person at the other end of the wire
informs the maid."

Woodhouse looked his confusion.

"Probably that silly ass at the quay who lost a bag of mine when
I landed," he apologized, as he rose. "If you'll pardon
me—"

Woodhouse passed up the stairs and into the library. He was
surprised to find Jaimihr Khan standing by the telephone, his hand
just in the act of setting the receiver back on the hook. The
Indian stepped swiftly to the double doors and shut them behind the
captain.

"A thousand pardons, Cap-tain"—he spoke
hurriedly—"the cap-tain will stand near the telephone. They
may come from the diningroom at any minute."

"What is all this?" Woodhouse began. "I was called on the
telephone."

"A call I had inspired, Cap-tain. It was necessary to see
you—at once and alone."

"Tactless! With the general suspecting me—you heard what
that woman from America said at the table—she has eyes in her
head!"

"I think he still trusts you, Cap-tain," the Indian replied.
"And to-night we must act. The fleet sails at noon to-morrow."

"We?" Woodhouse was on his guard at once. "What do you mean by
'we'?"

Jaimihr Khan smiled at the evasion.

"Yesterday in this room, Cap-tain, I burned a roll of
plans—"

"Which I had good reason to wish saved," Woodhouse caught him
up.

"No matter; I burned them—at a moment when you
were—in great peril, Cap-tain."

"Burned them, yes—perhaps to trap me further."

The Indian made a gesture of impatience. "Oh, excellent
discretion!" he cried in suppressed exasperation. "But we waste
time that is precious. To-night—"

"I carry no card. I am more discreet than—some," the other
answered insinuatingly.

"No card? Your number, then?"

Jaimihr Khan brought his lips close to the white man's ear and
whispered a number.

"Is that not correct?" he asked.

Woodhouse nodded curtly.

"And now that we are properly introduced," Jaimihr began, with a
sardonic smile, "may I venture a criticism? Your pardon, Cap-tain;
but our critics, they help us to per-fection. Since when have men
who come from the Wilhelmstrasse allowed themselves to make love in
drawing-rooms?"

"You mean—"

"You and the young woman from America—when I found you
together here yesterday..."

"That is my affair," was Woodhouse's hot response.

"The affair on which we work—this night—that is my
affair, be veree sure!" There was something of menace in the
Indian's tone.

Woodhouse bowed to his demand for an explanation. "That young
woman, as it happens, must be kept on our side. She saw me in
France, when Captain Woodhouse was supposed to be in Egypt."

"Ah, so?" Jaimihr inclined his head with a slight gesture
craving pardon. "For that reason you make a conquest. I did not
un-derstand."

"No matter. The fleet sails at noon."

"And our moment is here—to-night," Jaimihr whispered in
exultation. "Not until today did they admit you to the tower,
Cap-tain. How is it there?"

"A simple matter—with the combination to the door of Room
D."

With a single stride the Indian was over before the door of the
wall safe. He pointed.

"The combination of the inner door—it is in a special
compartment of that safe, protected by many wires. Before dawn I
cut the wires '.—and come to you with the combination."

"At whatever hour is best for you," Woodhouse put in
eagerly.

"Let us say three-thirty," Jaimihr answered. "You will be
waiting for me at the Hotel Splendide with—our friends there.
I shall come to you there, give you the combination, and you shall
go through the lines to the signal tower."

"There must be no slip," Woodhouse sternly warned.

"Not on my part, Cap-tain—count on that. For five years I
have been waiting—waiting. Five years a servant—yes, my
General; no, my General; very good, my General." The man's voice
vibrated with hate. "To-morrow, near dawn—the English fleet
shattered and ablaze in the harbor—the water red, like blood,
with the flames. Then, by the breath of Allah, my service
ends!"

Voices sounded in the hallway outside the double doors. Jaimihr
Khan, a finger to his lips, nodded as he whispered: "Three-thirty,
at the Splendide." He faded like a white wraith through the door to
General Crandall's room as the double doors opened and the
masculine faction of the dinner party entered. Woodhouse rose from
a stooping position at the telephone and faced them. To the
general, whose sharp scrutiny stabbed like thin knives, he made
plausible explanation. The beggar who lost his bag wanted a
complete identification of it—had run it down at
Algeciras.

When the cigars were lit, General Crandall excused himself for a
minute, sat at his desk, and hurriedly scratched a note. Summoning
Jaimihr, he ordered that the note be despatched by orderly direct
to Major Bishop and given to no other hands. Woodhouse, who
overheard his superior officer's command, was filled with vague
apprehension. What Mrs. Sherman had said at table—this
hurried note to Bishop; there was but one interpretation to give to
the affair—Crandall's suspicions were all alive again. Yet at
three-thirty—at the Hotel Splendide But when Crandall came
back to join the circle of smokers, he was all geniality. The women
came in by way of Jane Gerson's room; they had been taking a
farewell peek at her dazzling stock of gowns, they said, before
they were packed for the steamer.

"There was one or two I just had to see again," Mrs. Sherman
explained for the benefit of all, "before I said good-by to them.
One of them, by Madam Paquin, father, I'm going to copy when we get
home. I'll be the first to introduce a Paquin into little
Kewanee."

"Well, don't get into trouble with the minister, mother," Henry
J. warned. "Some of the French gowns I've seen on this trip
certainly would stir things up in Kewanee."

Jaimihr served the coffee. Woodhouse tried to maneuver Jane into
a tete-a-tete in an angle of the massive fireplace, but she
outgeneraled him, and the observant Mrs. Sherman cornered him
inexorably.

"Tell me, Captain Woodhouse," she began, in her friendly tones,
"you said a while ago the general might mistake you for a spy.
Don't you have a great deal of trouble with spies in your army in
war time? Everybody took us for spies in Germany, and in France
they thought poor Henry was carrying bombs to blow up the Eiffel
Tower."

"Perhaps I can answer that question better than Captain
Woodhouse," the general put in, rising and striding over to where
Mrs. Sherman kept the captain prisoner. "Captain Woodhouse, you
see, would not be so likely to come in touch with those troublesome
persons as one in command of a post, like myself." The most
delicate irony barbed this speech, lost to all but the one for whom
it was meant.

"Oh, I know I'm going to hear something very exciting," Mrs.
Sherman chortled. "Kitty, you'd better hush up Willy Kimball for a
while and come over here. You can improve your mind better
listening to the general."

Crandall soon was the center of a group. He began, with sober
directness.

"Well, in the matter of spies in war time, Mrs. Sherman, one is
struck by the fact of their resemblance to the plague—you
never can tell when they're going to get you or whence they came.
Now here on the Rock I have reason to believe we have one or more
spies busy this minute."

Jane Gerson, sitting where the light smote her face, drew back
into the shadow with a swift movement of protectiveness. Woodhouse,
who balanced a dainty Satsuma coffee cup on his knee, kept his eyes
on his superior's face with a mildly interested air.

"In fact," Crandall continued evenly, "I shouldn't be surprised
if one—possibly two spies—should be arrested before the
night is over. And the point about this that will interest you
ladies is that one of these—the one whose order for arrest I
have already given—is a woman—a very clever and pretty
woman, I may add, to make the story more interesting."

"And the other, whose arrest may follow, is an accomplice of
hers, I take it, General!" Woodhouse put the question with easy
indifference. He was stirring his coffee abstractedly.

"Not only the accomplice, but the brains for both, Captain. A
deucedly clever person, I'm frank to admit."

"Oh, people! Come and see the flagship, signaling to the rest of
the fleet with its funny green and red lights!" It was Jane who had
suddenly risen and stood by the curtains screening the balcony
windows. "They look like little flowers opening and shutting."

The girl's diversion was sufficient to take interest momentarily
from General Crandall's revelation. When all had clustered around
the windows, conversation skipped to the fleet, its power, and the
men who were ready to do battle behind its hundreds of guns. Mrs.
Sherman was disappointed that the ships did not send up rockets.
She'd read somewhere that ships sent up rockets, and she didn't see
why these should prove the exception. Interruption came from
Jaimihr Khan, who bore a message for Consul Reynolds. The fussy
little man ripped open the envelope with an air of importance.

"Ah, listen, folks! Here we have the latest wireless from the
Saxonia, 'Will anchor about two—sail six. Have all
passengers aboard by five-thirty.' " Excited gurgles from the
refugees. "That means," Reynolds wound up, with a flourish,
"everybody at the docks by five o'clock. Be there myself, to see
you off. Must go now—lot of fuss and feathers getting
everybody fixed." He paused before Jane.

"You're going home at last, young lady," he chirped.

"That depends entirely on Miss Gerson herself." It was the
general who spoke quietly but emphatically.

Reynolds looked at him, surprised.

"Why, I understood it was all arranged—"

"I repeat, it depends entirely on Miss Gerson."

Woodhouse caught the look of fear in Jane's eyes, and, as they
fell for the instant on his, something else—appeal. He turned
his head quickly. Lady Crandall saved the situation.

"Oh, that's just some more of George's eternal red tape. I'll
snip it when the time comes."

The consul's departure was the signal for the others. They
crowded around Lady Crandall and her husband with voluble praise
for the American dinner and thanks for the courtesy they had found
on the Rock. Woodhouse, after a last despairing effort to have a
word of farewell with Jane, which she denied, turned to make his
adieu to his host and hostess.

"No hurry, Captain," Crandall caught him up. "Expect Major
Bishop in every minute—? small matter of official detail. You
and he can go down the Rock together when he leaves."

Woodhouse's mind leaped to the meaning behind his superior's
careless words. The hastily despatched note—that was to
summon Bishop to Government House; Crandall's speech about the two
spies and the arrest of one of them—Louisa, he
meant—and now this summary order that he wait the arrival of
Bishop—would the second arrest be here in this room? The man
who carried a number from the Wilhelmstrasse felt the walls of the
library slowly closing in to crush him; he could almost hear the
whisper and mutter of the inexorable machine moving them
closer—closer. Be alone with the man whose word could send
bullets into his heart!

"A very pleasant dinner—Lady Crandall's," Woodhouse began,
eager to lighten the tenseness of the situation.

"Rather odd, Americans. But jolly nice." The captain laughed in
reminiscence of the unspoiled Shermans.

"I thought so—I married one," Crandall retorted.

The ear of Woodhouse's mind could hear more plainly now the
grinding of the cogs; the immutable power of fate lay there.

"Oh—er—so you did. Very kind she has been to me. I
got very little of this sort of thing at Wady Haifa."

"By the way, Woodhouse"—Crandall blew a contemplative puff
toward the ceiling—"strange Mrs. Sherman should have thought
she saw you at Berlin."

"Odd mistake, to be sure," Woodhouse admitted, struggling to put
ease into his voice. "The lady seems to have a penchant, as her
husband says, for finding familiar faces."

"Major Bishop!" Jaimihr Khan announced at the double doors. The
major in person followed immediately. His greeting to Woodhouse was
constrained.

"Woodhouse will wait for you to go down the Rock with him,"
Crandall explained to the newcomer. "Captain, excuse us for a
minute, while we go into my room and run over a little matter of
fleet supplies. Must check up with the fleet before it sails in the
morning." Woodhouse bowed his acquiescence and saw the door to the
general's room close behind the twain.

He was not long alone. Noiselessly the double doors opened and
Jaimihr Khan entered. Woodhouse sprang to meet him where he stood
poised for flight just inside the doors.

"The woman's prattle of Berlin—" the Indian whispered.

"Yes, the general's suspicions are all aroused again."

"Listen! I saw the note he sent to Bishop. The major is to be
set to watch you to-night—all night. A false step and you
will be under arrest." Jaimihr's thin face was twisted in wrath.
"One man's life will not stand in our way now."

"No," Woodhouse affirmed.

"Success is veree near. When Bishop goes with you down the
Rock—"

"Yes, yes! What?"

"The pistol screams, but the knife is dumb. Quick, Cap-tain!"
With a swift movement of his hand the Indian passed a thin-bladed
dirk to the white man. The latter secreted the sheathed weapon in a
pocket of his dinner jacket. He nodded understanding.

"One man's life—nothing!" Jaimihr breathed.

"It shall be done," Woodhouse whispered.

Jaimihr faded through the double doors like a spirit in a
medium's cabinet. He had seen what the captain was slower to
notice. The door from Jane Gerson's room was opening. The girl
stepped swiftly into the room, and was by Woodhouse's side almost
before he had seen her.

"I could not—go
away—without—without—"

"Miss Gerson—Jane!" He was beside her instantly. His hand
sought and found one of hers and held it a willing prisoner. She
was trembling, and her eyes were deep pools, riffled by conflicting
currents. Her words came breathlessly:

"I was not myself—I tried to tell myself you were
deceiving me just—just as a part of this terrible mystery you
are involved in. But when I heard General Crandall tell you to
wait—that and what he said about the spies—I knew you
were again in peril, and—and—"

"And you have come to me to tell me as goodby you believe I am
honest and that you care—a little?" Woodhouse's voice
trembled with yearning. "When you think me in danger, then you
forget doubts and maybe—your heart—"

"Oh, I want to believe—I want to!" she whispered
passionately. "Every one here is against you. Tell me you are on
the level—with me, at least."

"I am—with you."

"I—believe," she sighed, and her head fell near his
shoulder—so near that with alacrity Captain Woodhouse settled
it there.

"When this war is over, if I am alive," he was saying
rapturously, "may I come to America for you? Will
you—wait?"

"Perhaps."

The door to General Crandall's room opened. They sprang apart
just as Crandall and Bishop entered the library. The former was not
blind to the situation; he darted a swift glance into the girl's
face and read much there.

"Ready, Captain?" Bishop chirped, affecting not to notice the
momentary confusion of the man and the girl.

Woodhouse gave Jane's hand a lingering clasp; mutely his eyes
adjured her to remember her plighted troth. In another minute he
was gone.

The general and his guest were alone. Jane Gerson was bidding
him good night when he interrupted, somewhat gruffly:

"Well, young woman, have you made up your mind? Do you sail in
the morning—or not?"

"I made up my mind to that long ago," she answered briskly. "Of
course I sail."

"Then you're going to tell me what I want to know. Sensible
girl!" He rubbed his hands in satisfaction.

"What is it you want to know, General Crandall?" This almost
carelessly from her.

"When did you meet Woodhouse before—and where?"

"How do you know I met him before?" She attempted to parry, but
Crandall cut her short with a gesture of impatience:

"Please don't try that tack again. Answer those two questions,
and you sail in the morning."

Jane Gerson's eyes grew hard, and she lifted her chin in
defiance.

"And if I refuse—"

"Why should you?" Crandall affected surprise not altogether
unfelt.

"No matter—I do!" The challenge came crisp and sharp-cut
as a new blade. Gibraltar's governor lost his temper instanter; his
face purpled.

"And I know why!" he rasped. "He's got round you—made love
to you—tricked you! I'd swear he was kissing you just the
minute I came in here. The German cad! Good lord, girl; can't you
see how he's using you?"

"I'm afraid I can't."

Crandall advanced toward her, shaking a menacing finger at
her.

"Let me tell you something, young woman: he's at the end of his
rope. Done for! No use for you to stand up for him longer. He's
under guard to-night, and a woman named Josepha, his
accomplice—or maybe his dupe—is already under arrest,
and to-morrow, when we examine her, she'll reveal his whole rotten
schemes or have to stand against a wall with him. Come, now! Throw
him over. Don't risk your job, as you call it, for a German spy
who's tricked you—made a fool of you. Why—"

"General Crandall I" Her face was white, and her eyes glowed
with anger.

"I—I beg your pardon. Miss Gerson," he mumbled. "I am
exasperated. A fine girl like you—to throw away all your
hopes and ambitions for a spy—and a bounder! Can't you see
you're wrong?"

"General Crandall, some time—I hope it will be
soon—you will apologize to me—and to Captain
Woodhouse—for what you are saying tonight." Her hands
clenched into fists, whereon the knuckles showed white; the poise
of her head, held a little forward, was all combative.

"Then you won't tell me what I want to know?" He could not but
read the defiance in the girl's pose. "I will tell you nothing but
good-by." "No, by gad—you won't! I can be stubborn, too. You
shan't sail on the Saxonia in the morning. Understand?"

"Oh, shan't I? Who will dare stop me?" "I will, Miss Gerson. I
have plenty of right—and the power, too."

"I'll ask you to tell that to my consul—on the dock at
five to-morrow morning. Until then. General Crandall, au
revoir."

The door of the guest room shut with a spiteful slam upon the
master of Gibraltar, leaving him to nurse a grievance on the knees
of wrath.

JOSEPH AIMER and Captain Woodhouse sat in the
darkened and heavily blinded office-reception room of the Hotel
Splendide. All the hotel had long since been put to bed, and the
silence in the rambling house was audible. The hands of the Dutch
clock on the wall were pointing to the hour of three-thirty.

Strain was on both the men. They spoke in monosyllables, and
only occasionally. Aimer's hand went out from time to time to lift
a squat bottle of brandy from the table between them and pour a
tiny glass brimful; he quaffed with a sucking noise. Woodhouse did
not drink.

"It is three-thirty," the latter fretted, with an eye on the
mottled clock dial.

"He will come," Aimer assured. A long pause.

"This man Jaimihr—he is thoroughly dependable?" The man in
uniform put the question with petulant bruskness.

"It is his passion—what we are to do
tonight—something he has lived for—his religion.
Nothing except judgment day could—

Hah!"

The sharp chirp of a telephone bell, a dagger of sound in the
silence, broke Aimer's speech. He bounded to his feet; but not so
quickly as Woodhouse, who was across the room in a single stride
and had the receiver to his ear.

"Well, well! Yes, this is the one you name." Woodhouse turned to
Aimer, and his lips framed the word Jaimihr. "Yes, yes; all is
well—and waiting. Bishop? He is beyond
interference—coming down the Rock—I did the work
silently. What's that?" Woodhouse's face was tensed in strain; his
right hand went to a breast pocket and brought out a pencil. With
it he began making memoranda on the face of a calendar by his
side.

"Seven turns—ah, yes—four to the left correct." His
writing hand was moving swiftly. "Press, one to the right. Good! I
have it, and am off at once. Good-by!"

Woodhouse finished a line of script on the calendar face, hung
up the receiver. He carefully tore the written notes from the
calendar and put them into his pocket.

"Jaimihr says he has work to do at Government House and can not
come down." Woodhouse turned to Aimer and explained in rapid
sentences. "But he's given me the combination—to Room
D—over the wire, and now I'm off!"

Aimer was all excitement now. He hovered lovingly about
Woodhouse, patting him on the shoulder, giving him his helmet,
mothering him with little cooing noises.

"Speed quickly, Nineteen Thirty-two! Up the Rock to the signal
tower. Nineteen Thirty-two, to do the deed that will boom around
the world. The switches—one pull, my brother, and the
fatherland is saved to triumph over her enemies, victorious!"

"Right, Aimer!" Woodhouse was moving toward the door. "In eight
minutes history will be made. The minute you hear the blast, start
for Spain. I will try to escape, but I doubt—"

A knock came at the barred front door—one knock, followed
by three. Both men were transfixed. Aimer, first to recover his
calmness, motioned Woodhouse through the door to the dining-room.
When his companion had disappeared, he stepped to the door and
cautiously asked: "Who knocks?"

An answer came that caused him to shoot back the bolts and
thrust out his head. A message was hurriedly whispered into his
ear. The Splendide's proprietor withdrew his head and slipped the
bolt home again. His face was a thundercloud as he summoned
Woodhouse; his breath came in wheezy gasps.

"My Arab boy comes to the door just now to tell me of Louisa's
fate; she has been arrested," he said.

"Come, Aimer! I am going to the signal tower—there is
still time for us to strike."

Out on to Waterport Street leaped Woodhouse, and the door closed
behind him.

JANE GERSON, tossing on her pillows, heard the
mellow bell of a clock somewhere in the dark and silent house
strike three. This was the fifth time she had counted the measured
strokes of that bell as she lay, wide-eyed, in the guest chamber's
canopied bed. An eternity had passed since the dinner guests'
departure. Her mind was racing like some engine gone wild, and
sleep was impossible. Over and over again she had conned the events
of the evening, always to come at the end against the impasse of
General Crandall's blunt denial: "You shan't sail in the morning."
In her extremity she had even considered flight by
stealth—the scaling of walls perhaps, and a groping through
dark streets to the wharf, there to smuggle herself somehow on a
tender and so gain the Saxonia. But her precious gowns! They
still reposed in their bulky hampers here in Government House; to
escape and leave them behind would be worse than futile. The
governor's fiat seemed absolute.

Urged by the impulse of sheer necessity to be doing
something—the bed had become a rack—the girl rose, lit
a taper, and began to dress herself, moving noiselessly. She even
packed her traveling bag to the last inch and locked it. Then she
sat on the edge of the bed, hands helplessly folded in her lap.
What to do next? Was she any better off dressed than thrashing in
the bed? Her yearning called up a picture of the Saxonia,
which must ere this be at her anchorage, since the consul said she
was due at two. In three short hours tenders would puff alongside;
a happy procession of refugees climb the gangway—among them
the Shermans and Willy Kimball, bound for their Kewanee; the
captain on the bridge would give an order; winches would puff, the
anchor heave from the mud, the big boat's prow slowly turn
westward—oceanward—toward New York! And she, a prisoner
caught by the mischance of war's great mystery, would have to watch
that diminishing column of smoke fade against the morning's
blue—disappear.

Inspiration seized her. It would be something just to see the
Saxonia, now lying amid the grim monsters of the war fleet.
From the balcony of the library, just outside the door of her room,
she could search the darkness of the harbor for the prickly rows of
lights marking the merchant ship from her darker neighbors. The
general's marine glasses lay on his desk, she remembered. To steal
out to the balcony, sweep the harbor with the glasses, and at last
hit on the ship of deliverance—for all but her; to do this
would be better than counting the hours alone. She softly opened
the door of her room. Beyond lay the dim distances of the library,
suddenly become vast as an amphitheater; in the thin light
filtering through the curtains screening the balcony appeared the
lumpy masses of furniture and vague outlines of walls and doors.
She closed the door behind her, and stood trembling; this was
somehow like burglary, she felt—at least it had the thrill of
burglary.

The girl tiptoed around a high-backed chair, groped her way to
the general's desk, and fumbled there. Her hand fell upon the
double tubes of the binoculars. She picked them up, parted the
curtains, and stepped through the opened glass doors to the
balcony. Not a sound anywhere but the faint cluck and cackle of
cargo hoists down in the harbor. Jane put the glasses to her eyes,
and began to sweep the light-pointed vista below the cliff. Scores
of pin-prick beams of radiance marked the fleet where it choked the
roadstead—red and white beetles' eyes in the dark. She swung
the glasses nearer shore. Ah, there lay the Saxonia, with
her three rows of glowing portholes near the water; the binoculars
even picked out the double column of smoke from her stacks. Three
brief hours and that mass of shadow would be
moving—moving—

A noise, very slight, came from the library behind the opened
doors. The marine glasses remained poised in the girl's hands while
she listened. Again the noise—a faint metallic click.

She hardly breathed. Turning ever so slowly, she put one hand
between the curtains and parted them so that she could look through
into the cavernous gloom behind her.

A light moved there—a clear round eye of light. Behind it
was the faintest suggestion of a figure at the double
doors—just a blur of white, it was; but it moved stealthily,
swiftly. She heard a key turn in a lock. Then swiftly the eye of
light traveled across the library to the door leading to General
Crandall's room. There it paused to cut the handle of the door and
keyhole beneath out of darkness. A brown hand slipped into the
clear shaft of whiteness, put a key into the keyhole, and softly
turned it. The same was done for the locks of Lady Crandall's door,
on the opposite side of the library, and for the one Jane had just
closed behind her—her own door. Than the circle of light,
seeming to have an intelligence all its own, approached the desk,
flew swiftly to a drawer and there paused. Once more the brown hand
plunged into the bore of light; the drawer was carefully opened,
and a steel-blue revolver reflected bright sparks from its barrel
as it was withdrawn.

Jane, hardly daring to breathe, and with the heavy curtains
gathered close so that only a space for her eyes was left open,
watched the orb of light, fascinated. It groped under the desk,
found a nest of slender wires. There was a "Snick—snick!" and
the severed ends of the wires dropped to the floor. The burnished
dial of the wall safe, set near the double doors, was the next
object to come under the restless searching eye. While light poured
steadily upon the circular bit of steel, delicate fingers played
with it, twisting and turning this way and that. Then they were
laid upon the handle of the safe door, and it swung noiselessly
back. A tapering brown hand, white-sleeved, fumbled in a small
drawer, withdrew a packet of papers and selected one.

Jane stepped boldly into the room.

"Sahibah!" The white club of the electric flash smote her full
in the face.

"What are you doing at that safe, Jaimihr Khan?" Jane spoke as
steadily as she could, though excitement had its fingers at her
throat, and all her nerves were twittering. She heard some sharply
whistled foreign word, which might have been a curse.

"Something that concerns you not at all, Sahibah," the Indian
answered, his voice smooth as oil. He kept the light fair on her
face.

"Veree, veree foolish, Sahibah!" Jaimihr whispered, and with
catlike stride he advanced to meet her. "Veree foolish to come here
at this time."

Jane, frozen with horror at the man's approach, dodged and ran
swiftly to the fireplace, where hung the ancient vesper bell. The
flash light followed her every move—picked out her hand as it
swooped down to seize a heavy poker standing in its rack beside the
bell.

"Sahibah! Do not strike that bell!" The warning came sharp and
cold as frost. Her hand was poised over the bell, the heavy stub of
the poker a very few inches away from the bell's flare.

"To strike that bell might involve in great trouble one who is
veree dear to you, Sahibah. Let us talk this over most calmly.
Surely you would not desire that a friend—a veree dear
friend—"

"Who do you mean?" she asked sharply.

"Ah—that I leave to you to guess!" Jaimihr Khan's voice
was silken. "But certainly you know, Sahibah. A friend the most
important—"

Then she suddenly understood. The Indian was referring to
Captain Woodhouse thus glibly. Anger blazed in her.

"It isn't true!"

"Sahibah, I am sorry to con-tradict." Jaimihr Ehan had begun
slowly to creep toward her, his body crouching slightly as a
stalking cat's.

"I'll prove it isn't true!" she cried, and brought the poker
down on the bell with a sharp blow. Like a tocsin came its
answering alarm.

"A thousand devils!" The Indian leaped for the girl, but she
evaded him and ran to put the desk between herself and him. He had
snapped off the torch at the clang of the bell, and now he was a
pale ghost in the gloom—fearsome. Hissing Indian curses, he
started to circle the desk to seize her.

"Open this door! Open it, I say!" It was the general's voice,
sounding muffled through the panels of his door; he rattled the
knob viciously. Jane tried to run to the door, but the Indian
seized her from behind, threw her aside, and made for the double
doors. There his hand went to a panel in the wall, turned a light
switch, and the library was on the instant drenched with light.
Jaimihr Khan threw before the door of the safe the bundle of papers
he was clutching when Jane discovered him and which he had gripped
during the ensuing tense moments. Then he stepped swiftly to the
general's door and unlocked it.

General Crandall, clad only in trousers and shirt, burst into
the room. His eyes leaped from the Indian to where Jane was
cowering behind his desk.

"What the devil is this?" he rasped. Jane opened her mouth to
answer, but the Indian forestalled her:

"The sahibah, General—I found her here before your opened
safe—"

"Good God!" General Crandall's eyes blazed. He leaped to the
safe, knelt and peered in. "A clever job, young woman!"

Jane, completely stunned by the Indian's swift strategy, could
hardly speak. She held up a hand, appealing for a hearing. General
Crandall eyed her with chilling scorn, then turned to his
servant.

"You have done well, Jaimihr."

"It—it isn't true!" Jane stammered. The governor took a
step toward her almost as if under impulse to strike her, but he
halted, and his lips curled in scorn.

"By gad, working with Woodhouse all the time, eh? And I thought
you a simple young woman he had trapped—even warned you
against him not six hours ago. What a fool I've been!" Jane
impulsively stretched forth her arms for the mercy of a hearing,
but the man went on implacably:

"I said he was making a fool of you—and all the time you
were making one of me. Clever young woman. I say, that must have
been a great joke for you—making a fool of the governor of
Gibraltar. You make me ashamed of myself. And my
servant—Jaimihr here; it is left to him to trap you while I
am blind. Bah! Jaimihr, my orderly—at once!" The Indian
smiled sedately and started for the double doors. Jane ran toward
the general with a sharp cry:

"General—let me explain—"

"Explain!" He laughed shortly. "What can you say? You come into
my house as a friend—you betray me—you break into my
safe—with Woodhouse, whom I'd warned you against, directing
your every move. Clever—clever! Jaimihr, do as I tell you. My
orderly at once!"

Jane threw herself between the Indian and the doors.

"One moment—before he leaves the room let me tell you he
lies? Your Indian lies. It was I who found him here—before
that safe!"

"The truth, General Crandall. I couldn't sleep. I came out here
to the balcony to try to make out if the Saxonia was in the
bay. He came into the room while I was behind these curtains,
locked the doors, and opened the safe."

"It won't go," the general cut in curtly.

"It's the truth—it's got to go!" she cried.

Jaimihr, at a second nod from his master, was approaching the
double doors. Jane, leaping in front of them, pushed the Indian
back.

"General Crandall, for your own sake—don't let this Indian
leave the room. You may regret it—all the rest of your life.
He still has a paper—a little paper—he took from that
safe. I saw him stick it in his sash."

"Nonsense!"

"Search him!" The girl's voice cracked in hysteria; her face was
dead white, with hectic burning spots in each cheek. "I'm not
pleading for myself now—for you. Search him before he leaves
this room!"

Jaimihr put strong hands on her arms to force her away from the
door. His black eyes were laughing down into hers.

"Let me ask him a question first, General Crandall—before
he leaves this room."

The governor's face reflected momentary surprise at this change
of tack. "Quickly then," he gruffly conceded. Jaimihr Khan stepped
back a pace, his eyes meeting the girl's coldly.

"How did you come into the room—when you found me here?"
she challenged. The Indian pointed to the double doors over her
shoulder. She reached behind her, grasped the knob, and shook it.
"Locked!" she announced.

"Why not?" Jaimihr asked. "I locked them after me."

"And the general's door was locked?"

"Yes—yes!" Crandall broke in impatiently. "What's this got
to do with—"

"Did you lock the general's door?" she questioned the
Indian.

"No, Sahibah; you did."

"And I suppose I locked the door to Lady Crandall's room and my
door?"

"If they, too, are locked—yes, Sahibah."

"Then why"—Jane's voice quavered almost to a
shriek—"why had I failed to lock the double doors—the
doors through which you came?"

The Indian caught his breath, and darted a look at the general.
The latter, eying him keenly, stepped to his desk and pressed a
button.

"Very good; remain here, Jaimihr," he said. Then to Jane: "I
will have him searched, as you wish. Then both of you go to the
cells until I sift this thing to the bottom."

"General! You wouldn't dare!" She stood aghast.

"Wouldn't I, though? We'll see whether—" A sharp click
sent his head jerking around to the right. Jaimihr Khan, at the
door to the general's room, was just slipping the key into his
girdle, after having turned the lock. His thin face was crinkled
like old sheepskin.

"What the devil are you doing?" Crandall exploded.

"If the general sahib is waiting for that bell to be
answered—he need not wait longer—it will not be
answered," Jaimihr Khan purred.

"What's this—what's this!"

"The wires are cut."

"Cut! Who did that?" The general started for the yellow man.
Jaimihr Khan whipped a blue-barreled revolver out of his broad sash
and leveled it at his master.

"Back, General Sahib! I cut them. The sahibah's story is true.
It was she who came in and found me at the safe."

"My God! You, Jaimihr—you a spy!" The general collapsed
weakly into a chair by the desk.

"Some might call me that, my General." Jaimihr's weapon was
slowly swinging to cover both the seated man and the girl by the
doors. "No need to search that drawer, General Sahib. Your pistol
is pointing at you this minute."

"You'll pay for this!" Crandall gasped.

"That may be. One thing I ask you to remember. If one of you
makes a move I will kill you both. You are a gallant man, my
General; is it not so? Then remember."

Crandall started from his chair, but the uselessness of his bare
hands against the snub-nosed thing of blue metal covering him
struck home. He sank back with a groan. Keeping them both carefully
covered, Jaimihr moved to the desk telephone at the general's
elbow. He took from his sash a small piece of paper—the one
he had saved from the packet of papers taken from the
safe—laid it on the edge of the desk, and with his left hand
he picked up the telephone. An instant of tense silence, broken by
the wheezing of the general's breath, then "Nine-two-six, if you
please. Yes—yes, who is this? Ah, yes. It is I, Jaimihr Khan.
Is all well with you? Good! And Bishop? Slain coming down the
Rock—good also!"

Crandall groaned. The Indian continued his conversation
imperturbed.

"Veree good! Listen closely. I can not come as I have promised.
There is—work—for me here. But all will be well. Take
down what I shall tell you." He read from the slip of paper on the
desk. "Seven turns to the right, four to the left—press! Two
more to the left—press! One to the right. You have that?
Allah speed you. Go quickly!"

"Room D!" Crandall had leaped from his chair.

"Correct, my General—Room D." Jaimihr smiled as he stepped
away from the telephone, his back against the double doors. The
sweat stood white on Crandall's brow; his mouth worked in jerky
spasms.

"What—what have you done?" he gasped.

"I see the general knows too well," came the Indian's silken
response. "I have given the combination of the inner door of Room D
in the signal tower to a—friend. He is on his way to the
tower. He will be admitted—one of the few men on the Rock who
could be admitted at this hour, my General. One pull of the
switches in Room D—and where will England's great fleet be
then?"

"You yellow devil!" Crandall started to rush the white figure by
the doors, but his flesh quailed as the round cold muzzle met it.
He staggered back.

"We are going to wait, my General—and you, American
Sahibah, who have pushed your way into this affair. We are going to
wait—and listen—listen."

The general writhed in agony. Jane, fallen into a chair by the
far edge of the desk, had her head buried in her arms, and was
sobbing.

"And we are going to think, my General," the Indian's voice
purled on. "While we wait we shall think. Who will General Crandall
be after to-night—the English sahib who ruled the Rock the
night the English fleet was blown to hell from inside the fortress?
How many widows will curse when they hear his name?
What—"

"Jaimihr Khan, what have I ever done to you!" The governor's
voice sounded hardly human. His face was blotched and purple.

"Not what you have done, my General—what the English army
has done. An old score, General—thirty years old. My
father—he was a prince in India—until this English army
took away his throne to give it to a lying brother. The
army—the English army—murdered my father when he tried
to get it back—called it mutiny. Ah, yes, an old score; but
by the breath of Allah, to-night shall see it paid!"

The man's eyes were glittering points of white-hot steel. All of
his thin white teeth showed like a hound's.

"You dog!" The general feebly wagged his head at the Indian.

"Your dog, my General. Five years your dog, when I might have
been a prince. My friend goes up the
Rock—step—step—step. Closer—closer to the
tower, my General. And Major Bishop—where is he? Ah, a knife
is swift and makes no noise—"

"What a fool I've been!" Crandall rocked in his chair, and
passed a trembling hand before his eyes. Sudden rage turned his
bloodshot eyes to where the girl was stretched, sobbing, across the
desk. "Your man—the man you protected—it is he who goes
to the signal tower, girl!"

"No—no; it can't be," she whispered between the rackings
of her throat.

"It is! Only a member of the signal service could gain
admittance into the tower to-night. Besides—who was it went
with Bishop down the Rock after the dinner to-night? And I—I
sent Bishop with him—sent him to his death. He was tricking
you all the time. I told you he was. I warned you he was playing
with you—using you for his own rotten ends—using you to
help kill forty thousand men!"

It needed not the sledge-hammer blows of the stricken Crandall
to batter Jane Gerson's heart. She had read too clearly the full
story Jaimihr Khan's sketchy comments had outlined. She knew now
Captain Woodhouse, spy. The Indian was talking again, his words
dropping as molten metal upon their raw souls.

"Forty thousand men! A pleasant thought, my General. Eight
minutes up the Rock to the tower when one moves fast. And my
friend—ah, he moves veree—veree fast. Eight minutes,
and four have already passed. Watch the windows—the windows
looking out to the bay. General and Sahibah. They will
flame—like blood. Your hearts will stop at the great noise,
and then—"

A knock sounded at the double doors behind Jaimihr. He stopped
short, startled. All listened. Again came the knock. Without
turning his eyes from the two he guarded, Jaimihr asked: Who is
it?"

"Woodhouse," came the answer.

Jane's heart stopped. Crandall sat frozen in his seat. Jaimihr
turned the key in the lock, and the doors opened. In stepped
Captain Woodhouse, helmeted, armed with sword and revolver at
waist. He stood facing the trio, his swift eye taking in the
situation at once. Crandall half rose from his seat, his face
apoplectic.

"Spy! Secret killer of men!" he gasped.

Woodhouse paid no heed to him, but turned to Jaimihr.

"Quick! The combination," he said. "Over the phone—afraid
I might not have it right—stopped here on my way to the
tower—be there in less than three minutes if you can hold
these people."

"Everything is all right?" Jaimihr asked suspiciously.

"You mean Bishop? Yes. Quick, the combination!"

Jaimihr picked the slip of paper containing the formula from the
edge of the desk with his disengaged left hand and passed it to
Woodhouse.

The latter stretched out his hand, grasped the Indian's with a
lightning move, and threw it over so that the latter was off his
balance. In a twinkling Woodhouse's left hand had wrenched the
revolver from Jaimihr's right and pinioned it behind his back. The
whole movement was accomplished in half a breath. Jaimihr Khan
knelt in agony, and in peril of a broken wrist, at the white man's
feet, disarmed, harmless. Woodhouse put a silver whistle to his
lips and blew three short blasts.

A tramp of feet in the hallway outside, and four soldiers with
guns filled the doorway.

"Take this man!" Woodhouse commanded.

The Indian, in a frenzy, writhed and shrieked:

"Traitor! English spy! Dog of an unbeliever!"

The soldiers jerked him to his feet and dragged him out; his
ravings died away in the passage.

Woodhouse brought his hand up in a salute as he faced General
Crandall.

"The other spy, Aimer, of the Hotel Splendide, has just been
arrested, sir. Major Bishop has taken charge of him and has lodged
him in the cells."

A high-pitched scream sounded behind Lady Crandall's door, and a
pounding on the panels. Jane Gerson, first to recover from the
shock of surprise, ran to unlock the door. Lady Crandall, in a
dressing gown, burst into the library and flung herself on her
husband.

"George—George! What does all this
mean—yells—whistling—"

General Crandall gave his wife a pat on the shoulder and put her
aside with a mechanical gesture. He took a step toward Woodhouse,
who still stood stiffly before the opened doors; the dazed governor
walked like a somnambulist.

"Who—who the devil are you, sir?" he managed to
splutter.

"I am Captain Cavendish, General." Again the hand came to stiff
salute on the visor of the pith helmet. "Captain Cavendish, of the
signal service, stationed at Khartum, but lately detached for
special service under the intelligence office in Downing
Street."

The man's eyes jumped for an instant to seek Jane Gerson's
face—found a smile breaking through the lines of doubt
there.

"Your papers to prove your identity!" Crandall demanded, still
in a fog of bewilderment.

"I haven't any, General Crandall," the other replied, with a
faint smile, "or your Indian, Jaimihr Khan, would have placed them
in your hands after the search of my room yesterday. I've convinced
Major Bishop of my genuineness, however—after we left your
house and when the moment for action arrived. A cable to Sir
Ludlow-Service, in the Downing Street office, will confirm my
story. Meanwhile I am willing to go under arrest if you think
best."

"But—but I don't understand,
Captain—er—Cavendish. You posed as a German—as an
Englishman."

"Briefly, General, a girl secretly in the pay of the Downing
Street office—Louisa Schmidt,—Josepha, the cigar girl,
whom you ordered locked up a few hours ago—is the English
representative in the Wilhelmstrasse at Berlin. She learned of a
plan to get a German spy in your signal tower a month before war
was declared, reported it to London, and I was summoned from
Khartum to London to play the part of the German spy. At Berlin,
where she had gone from your own town of Gibraltar to meet me, she
arranged to procure me a number in the Wilhelmstrasse through the
agency of a dupe named Capper—"

"Capper! Good Lord!" Crandall stammered.

"With the number I hurried to Alexandria.
Woodhouse—Captain Woodhouse, from Wady Haifa—a victim,
poor chap, to the necessities of our plan, fell into the hands of
the Wilhelmstrasse men there, and I gained possession of his
papers. The Germans started him in a robber caravan of Bedouins for
the desert, but I provided against his getting far before being
rescued, and the German agents there were all rounded up the day I
sailed as Woodhouse."

"And you came here to save Gibraltar—and the fleet from
German spies?" Crandall put the question dazedly.

"There were only two, General—Aimer and your servant,
Jaimihr. We have them now. You may order the release of Louisa
Schmidt."

"The captain has overlooked one other—the most dangerous
one of all, General Crandall." Jane stepped up to where the
governor stood and threw back her hands with an air of submission.
"Her name is Jane Gerson, of New York, and she knew all along that
this gentleman was deceiving you—she had met him, in fact,
three weeks before on a railroad train in France."

The startled eyes of Gibraltar's master looked first at the set
features of the man, then to the girl's flushed face. Little lines
of humor crinkled about the corners of his mouth.

"Captain Cavendish—or Woodhouse, make this girl a
prisoner—your prisoner, sir!"

FIVE o'clock at the quay, and already the new day
was being made raucous by the bustle of departure—shouts of
porters, tenders' jangling engine bells, thump of trunks dropped
down skidways, lamentations of voyagers vainly hunting baggage
mislaid. Out in the stream the Saxonia—a clean white
ship, veritable ark of refuge for pious Americans escaping the
deluge.

In the midst of a group of his countrymen Henry J. Sherman
stood, feet wide apart and straw hat cocked back over his bald
spot. He was narrating the breathless incidents of the night's dark
hour:

"Yes, sir, a soldier comes to our rooms about three-thirty
o'clock and hammers on our door. 'Everybody in this hotel's under
arrest,' he says. 'Kindly dress as soon as possible and report to
Major Bishop in the office.' And we not five hours before the
guests of General and Lady Crandall at Government House. What d'you
think of that for a quick change?

"Well, gentlemen, we piled down-stairs—with me minus a
collar button and havin' to hold my collar down behind with my
hand. And what do we find? This chap Aimer, with a face like a side
of cream cheese, standing in the middle of a bunch of soldiers with
guns; another bunch of soldiers surroundin' his Arab boy, who's as
innocent a little fellah as ever you set eyes on; and this Major
Bishop walkin' up and down, all excited, and sayin' something about
somebody's got a scheme to blow up the whole fleet out there. Which
might have been done, he says, if it wasn't for that fellah
Woodhouse we'd had dinner with just that very evening."

"Who's some sort of a spy. I knew it all the time, you see."
Mrs. Sherman was quick to claim her share of her fellow tourists'
attention. "Only he's a British spy set to watch the Germans. Major
Bishop told me that in confidence after it was all over—said
he'd never met a man with the nerve this Captain Woodhouse
has."

"Better whisper that word 'spy' soft," Henry J. admonished sotto
voce. "We're not out of this plagued Europe yet, and we've had
about all the excitement we can stand; don't want anybody to arrest
us again just the minute we're sailin'. But, as I was sayin', there
we all stood, foolish as goats, until in comes General Crandall,
followed by this Woodhouse chap. 'Excuse me, people, for causing
you this little inconvenience,' the general says. 'Major Bishop has
taken his orders too literal. If you'll go back to your rooms and
finish dressin' I'll have the army bus down here to take you to the
quay. The Hotel Splendide's accommodations have been slightly
disarranged by the arrest of its worthy proprietor.' So back we go,
and—by cricky, mother, here comes the general and Mrs.
Crandall now!"

Henry J. broke through the ring of passengers, and with a waving
of his hat, rushed to the curb. A limousine bearing the governor,
his lady and Jane Gerson, and with two bulky hampers strapped to
the baggage rack behind, was just drawing up.

"Why, of course we're down here to see you off—and bid you
Godspeed to little old Kewanee!" Lady Crandall was quick to
anticipate the Shermans' greetings. General Crandall, beaming
indulgently on the group of home-goers, had a hand for each.

"Yes—yes," he exclaimed. "After arresting you at three
o'clock we're here to give you a clean ticket at five. Couldn't do
more than that—what? Regrettable occurrence and all that, but
give you something to tell the stay-at-homes about when you get
back to—ah—"

"Kewanee, lllynoy, General," Sherman was quick to supply. "No
town like it this side the pearly gates."

Jane Gerson, who had been standing in the car, anxiously
scanning the milling crowd about the landing stage, caught sight of
a white helmet and khaki-clad shoulders pushing through the nearer
fringes of travelers. She slipped out of the limousine unseen, and
waited for the white helmet to be doffed before her.

"I was afraid maybe—" the girl began her cheeks suddenly
flaming.

"Afraid that, after all, it wasn't true?" the man she had found
in war's vortex finished, his gray eyes compelling hers to tell him
their whole message. "Afraid that Captain Cavendish might be as
vile a deceiver as Woodhouse? Does Cavendish have to prove himself
all over again, little girl?"

"No—no!" Her hands fluttered into his, and her lips were
parted in a smile. "It's Captain Woodhouse I want to
know—always; the man whose pledged word I held to."

"It must have been—hard," he murmured. "But you were
splendid—splendid!"

"No, I was not." Tears came to dim her eyes, and the hands he
held trembled. "Once—in one terrible moment this
morning—when Jaimihr told us you were going to the signal
tower—when we waited—waited to hear that awful noise,
my faith failed me. I thought you—"

"Forget that moment, Jane, dearest. A saint would have denied
faith then."

They were silent for a minute, their hearts quailing before the
imminent separation. He spoke:

"Go back to the States now; go back and show this Hildebrand
person you're a wonder!—a prize. Show him what I've known
more and more surely every moment since that meeting in Calais. But
give him fair warning; he's going to lose you."

"Lose me?" she echoed.

"Inevitably. Listen, girl! In a year my term of service is up,
and if the war's over I shall leave the army, come to the States to
you, and—and—do you think I could become a good
American?"

"If—if you have the proper teacher," the girl answered,
with a flash of mischief.

"All aboard for the Saxonia!" It was Consul Reynolds,
fussed, perspiring, overwhelmed with the sense of his duty, who
bustled up to where the Shermans were chatting with Lady Crandall
and the general. Reynolds' sharp eye caught an intimate tableau on
the other side of the auto. "And that means you, Miss Steplively
New York," he shouted, "much as I hate
to—ah—interrupt."

Jane Gerson saw her two precious hampers stemming a way through
the crowd on the backs of porters, bound for the tender's deck. She
could not let them out of her sight.

"Wait, Jane!" His hands were on her arms, and he would not let
her go. "Will you be my teacher? I want no other."

"My terms are high." She tried to smile, though trembling lips
belied her.

"I'd pay with my life," he whispered in a quick gust of passion.
"Here's my promise—"

He took her in his arms, and between them passed the world-old
pledge of man and girl.